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Activist Fiscal Policy to Stabilize Economic Activity

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Author Info
Alan J. Auerbach
William G. Gale

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Abstract

We review the evidence on the practice and effects of discretionary fiscal policy, particularly in the context of recent efforts to stimulate the economy, reaching two main conclusions. First, policy interventions have increased in this decade, pre-dating the 2009 stimulus. Second, despite a large economic literature on the topic, the state of theory and evidence is not as "shovel ready" as one would like. Although consumption and investment clearly respond to tax incentives and structural vector autoregressions show that lower taxes and higher government purchases can boost output, it is difficult to apply the findings in the current context, in part because multipliers and policy lags are likely to vary with economic conditions. Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models can be adapted to address extreme economic conditions, but yield an extremely wide range of predicted impacts. The experience from large downturns – the U.S. Great Depression and the Japanese Lost Decade – is illuminating, but provides little evidence about policy effectiveness because systematic and sustained fiscal interventions were not attempted in either case.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 15407.

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Date of creation: Oct 2009
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15407

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy
H3 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents

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