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Fiscal Policy, Wealth Effects, and Markups

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  • Tommaso Monacelli
  • Roberto Perotti

Abstract

We document that variations in government purchases generate a rise in consumption, the real and the product wage, and a fall in the markup. This evidence is robust across alternative empirical methodologies used to identify innovations in government spending (structural VAR vs. narrative approach). Simultaneously accounting for these facts is a formidable challenge for a neoclassical model, which relies on the wealth effect on labor supply as the main channel of transmission of unproductive government spending shocks. The goal of this paper is to explore further the role of the wealth effects in the transmission of government spending shocks. To this end, we build an otherwise standard business cycle model with price rigidity, in which preferences can be consistent with an arbitrarily small wealth effect on labor supply, and highlight that such effect is linked to the degree of complementarity between consumption and hours. We show that the model is able to match our empirical evidence on the effects of government spending shocks remarkably well. This happens when the preferences are such that the positive wealth effect on labor supply is small and therefore the negative wealth effect on consumption is, somewhat counterintuitively, large.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 14584.

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Date of creation: Dec 2008
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14584

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Cited by:
  1. Salotti, Simone & Marattin, Luigi, 2009. "On the usefulness of government spending in the EU area," MPRA Paper 19476, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  2. Benjamin Born & Alexandra Peter & Johannes Pfeifer, 2011. "Fiscal News and Macroeconomic Volatility," Bonn Econ Discussion Papers bgse08_2011, University of Bonn, Germany.
  3. Giovanni MELINA & Stefania VILLA, 2012. "Fiscal policy and lending relationships," Center for Economic Studies - Discussion papers ces12.06, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Centrum voor Economische Studiën.
  4. David Cook & Michael B. Devereux, 2011. "Sharing the burden: monetary and fiscal responses to a world liquidity trap," Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute Working Paper 84, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
  5. J. A. Carrillo & C. Poilly, 2012. "How do financial frictions affect the spending multiplier during a liquidity trap?," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 12/779, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
  6. António Afonso & Luís F. Costa, 2010. "Market power and fiscal policy in OECD countries," Working Paper Series 1173, European Central Bank.
  7. Hafedh Bouakez & Foued Chihi & Michel Normandin, 2010. "Measuring the Effects of Fiscal Policy," Cahiers de recherche 1016, CIRPEE.
  8. Stefano Eusepi & Bruce Preston, 2009. "Labor supply heterogeneity and macroeconomic comovement," Staff Reports 399, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  9. Werner Roeger & Jan in 't Veld, 2009. "Fiscal policy with credit constrained households," European Economy - Economic Papers 357, Directorate General Economic and Monetary Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission.
  10. Julio Carrillo & Celine Poilly, 2013. "Online Appendix to "How do financial frictions affect the spending multiplier during a liquidity trap?"," Technical Appendices 12-54, Review of Economic Dynamics.
  11. Slim Bridji and Matthieu Charpe, 2012. "Labour Market and Fiscal Policy," IHEID Working Papers 03-2012, Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies, revised 16 Feb 2012.

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