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Working Paper
Big G
“Big G” typically refers to aggregate government spending on a homogeneous good. In this paper, we open up this construct by analyzing the entire universe of procurement contracts of the US government and establish five facts. First, government spending is granular; that is, it is concentrated in relatively few firms and sectors. Second, relative to private expenditures its composition is biased. Third, procurement contracts are short-lived. Fourth, idiosyncratic variation dominates the fluctuation in spending. Last, government spending is concentrated in sectors with relatively sticky ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic Effects of Government Spending in China
Government spending plays an important role in determining economic performances in China. Its macroeconomic effects are analyzed in this paper. We show that government spending in China (i) Granger-causes output, consumption and investment booms as well as inflation and (ii) has a multiplier larger than 1. The large multiplier effects are found not only in aggregate time-series data but also in panel data at the provincial level. We also provide a theoretical model and Monte Carlo analysis to rationalize our empirical findings. Our theoretical and Monte Carlo analyses support the large ...
Working Paper
Estimating the Missing Intercept
Cross-sectional data have proven to be increasingly useful for macroeconomic research. However, their use often leads to the 'missing intercept' problem in which aggregate general equilibrium effects and policy responses are absorbed into fixed effects. We present a statistical approach to jointly estimate aggregate and idiosyncratic effects within a panel framework, leveraging identification strategies coming from both cross-sectional or time-series settings. We then apply our methodology to study government spending multipliers (Nakamura and Steinsson, 2014) and wealth effects from stock ...