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Working Paper
Output fluctuations and fiscal policy : U.S. state and local governments 1978-1994
What are the cyclical properties of U.S. state and local government fiscal policy? The budget surplus of local and, in particular, state governments is procyclical, smoothing disposable income and consumption of state residents. This happens over both short- and medium-term horizons. Procyclical surpluses are the result of strongly procyclical revenues, and weakly procyclical expenditures. The budgets of trust funds and utilities are procyclical. Federal grants are procyclical, exacerbating the cyclical amplitude of state level income movements; although they smooth the idiosyncratic ...
Journal Article
Is state fiscal policy asymmetric over the business cycle?
A number of stabilizers are thought to mute the business cycle. One key stabilizer is federal fiscal policy. The federal budget surplus tends to rise during economic booms and fall in downturns, helping to stabilize consumers? disposable income and thereby mitigate economic fluctuations. During booms, for example, the budget surplus typically rises because tax revenues rise more than expenditures.> Another stabilizer that has traditionally received less attention is state fiscal policy. Like the federal budget surplus, state government surpluses tend to rise during economic expansions and ...
Journal Article
Why Has Consumption Been So Volatile in the New Millennium?
U.S. consumption has gone through steep ups and downs since the turn of the millennium, but the causes of these fluctuations are still imperfectly identified. We describe research that quantifies the relative impact of nine significant determinants of consumption growth. The explanatory power of these factors varies by period, implying that successful modelling of this decade poses many challenges
Working Paper
Moving to a job: The role of home equity, debt, and access to credit
Using credit report data from two of the three major credit bureaus in the United States, we infer with high certainty whether households move to other labor markets defined by metropolitan areas. We estimate how moving patterns relate to labor market conditions, personal credit, and homeownership using panel regressions with fixed effects which control for all constant individual-specific traits. We interpret the patterns through simulations of a dynamic model of consumption, housing, and location choice. We find that homeowners with negative home equity move more than other homeowners, in ...
Journal Article
Banking deregulation helps small business owners stabilize their income
Once banking markets were opened up to geographic diversity and competition, more banks were in a better position to lend money to small businesses-even in tough times.
Journal Article
Is risk sharing in the United States a regional phenomenon?
Regions within the United States routinely experience economic fluctuations that differ from those of other regions. For example, in the past few years, falling wheat prices have slowed growth in the value of total output in Kansas. Such developments can pose concerns for policymakers because macroeconomic tools like monetary policy affect all regions, not just specific regions. Fortunately, several mechanisms help insulate regional income and consumption from region-specific output fluctuations. Diversification of asset ownership across regions, made possible by national capital markets, ...
Journal Article
Keeping the house or moving for a job
Some reports have suggested that employers can?t fill job openings in some places because they can?t entice workers to move. Workers won?t move, so the story goes, when doing so will mean losing money on their homes, and this is the case for many homeowners since the housing crash. But new research shows that homeowners will move when they have a better job offer, even if they will lose money on their home when they sell it.
Working Paper
The rise and fall of consumption in the '00s
The major portion of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) is accounted for by consumer spending, which significantly affects the business cycle. Consumer demand has been extremely volatile since 2000, especially given the booms and busts in housing values and in subprime mortgage lending. While it is well-established that housing net worth, credit availability, and household debt levels help to explain changes in consumer spending, the roles played by other potential determinants of consumption are not well identified or understood. This paper uses county-level data and a multiple-regression ...
Working Paper
Risk sharing and industrial specialization ; regional and international evidence
We provide empirical evidence that risk sharing enhances specialization in production. To the best of our knowledge, this well-established and important theoretical proposition has not been tested before. Our empirical procedure is summarized as follows. First, we construct a measure of specialization in production, and calculate an index of specialization for each of the European Community (EC) and non-EC OECD countries, U.S. states, Canadian provinces, Japanese prefectures, Latin American countries, and regions of Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Then, we estimate the degree of capital ...
Working Paper
Industrial specialization and the asymmetry of shocks across regions
Economic integration, through greater capital market integration, will induce higher regional specialization in production, rendering regional shocks less symmetric. To support this claim empirically, we develop a utility based measure of shock asymmetry and calculate it for each U.S. state. We regress it (using both ordinary least squares and instrumental variables) on a state-by-state 1-digit industrial specialization index and a 2-digit manufacturing specialization index, controlling for relevant economic and demographic variables. The main empirical result is that both specialization ...