IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/intecj/v28y2013i2p255-271.html

Is Fiscal Policy More Effective During Cyclical Downturns?

Author

Listed:
  • Georgios Karras

Abstract

Using a panel data set of 61 countries for the 1952-2007 period, the paper shows that fiscal policy is more potent during downturns than during expansions, and that the difference is substantial: the fiscal multiplier is twice as large when output is below its long-term trend. In particular, the empirical results suggest that during expansions the output 'multiplier' is less than one, private consumption is crowded out, and the response of investment is weak; whereas during downturns the output multiplier is greater than one, private consumption is not crowded out, and the response of investment is strong. Differences between expansion and downturn multipliers are found to be greater in low-income countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Georgios Karras, 2014. "Is Fiscal Policy More Effective During Cyclical Downturns?," International Economic Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(2), pages 255-271, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:intecj:v:28:y:2013:i:2:p:255-271
    DOI: 10.1080/10168737.2013.825304
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10168737.2013.825304
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/10168737.2013.825304?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andrew Mountford & Harald Uhlig, 2009. "What are the effects of fiscal policy shocks?," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 24(6), pages 960-992.
    2. Bachmann, Rüdiger & Sims, Eric R., 2012. "Confidence and the transmission of government spending shocks," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(3), pages 235-249.
    3. Valerie A. Ramey, 2011. "Identifying Government Spending Shocks: It's all in the Timing," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 126(1), pages 1-50.
    4. Christina D. Romer & David H. Romer, 2010. "The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(3), pages 763-801, June.
    5. Alan J. Auerbach & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2013. "Corrigendum: Measuring the Output Responses to Fiscal Policy," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 5(3), pages 320-322, August.
    6. Cogan, John F. & Cwik, Tobias & Taylor, John B. & Wieland, Volker, 2010. "Corrigendum to "New Keynesian versus old Keynesian government spending multipliers" [J. Econ. Dynam. Control 34(3) (2010) 281-295]," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 34(10), pages 2229-2229, October.
    7. Jonathan A. Parker, 2011. "On Measuring the Effects of Fiscal Policy in Recessions," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(3), pages 703-718, September.
    8. Lawrence Christiano & Martin Eichenbaum & Sergio Rebelo, 2011. "When Is the Government Spending Multiplier Large?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 119(1), pages 78-121.
    9. Robert E. Hall, 2009. "By How Much Does GDP Rise If the Government Buys More Output?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 40(2 (Fall)), pages 183-249.
    10. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 2001. "Vector Autoregressions," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 15(4), pages 101-115, Fall.
    11. Michael Woodford, 2011. "Simple Analytics of the Government Expenditure Multiplier," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 3(1), pages 1-35, January.
    12. Morten O. Ravn & Harald Uhlig, 2002. "On adjusting the Hodrick-Prescott filter for the frequency of observations," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 84(2), pages 371-375.
    13. Valerie A. Ramey, 2011. "Can Government Purchases Stimulate the Economy?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(3), pages 673-685, September.
    14. Robert J. Barro & Charles J. Redlick, 2011. "Macroeconomic Effects From Government Purchases and Taxes," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 126(1), pages 51-102.
    15. Jeffrey M Wooldridge, 2010. "Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 2, volume 1, number 0262232588, December.
    16. Tagkalakis, Athanasios, 2008. "The effects of fiscal policy on consumption in recessions and expansions," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(5-6), pages 1486-1508, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ashima Goyal & Bhavyaa Sharma, 2015. "Government expenditure in India: Composition, cyclicality and multipliers," Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai Working Papers 2015-032, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India.
    2. Rabia Rafique & Asad Nisar & Syed Sadaqat Ali Shah, 2024. "Testing the effects of fiscal policy shocks on output growth in recession and expansion: empirical evidence from developing countries," Economic Change and Restructuring, Springer, vol. 57(3), pages 1-26, June.
    3. Ashima Goyal & Bhavyaa Sharma, 2018. "Government Expenditure in India: Composition and Multipliers," Journal of Quantitative Economics, Springer;The Indian Econometric Society (TIES), vol. 16(1), pages 47-85, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Andrea Boitani & Salvatore Perdichizzi, 2018. "Public Expenditure Multipliers in recessions. Evidence from the Eurozone," DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza def068, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE).
    2. Salvatore Perdichizzi, 2017. "Estimating Fiscal multipliers in the Eurozone. A Nonlinear Panel Data Approach," DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza def058, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE).
    3. Banerjee, Ryan & Zampolli, Fabrizio, 2019. "What drives the short-run costs of fiscal consolidation? Evidence from OECD countries," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 420-436.
    4. Javier Andrés & José Emilio Boscá & Javier Ferri, 2011. "Household Leverage and Fiscal Multipliers," Working Papers 1103, International Economics Institute, University of Valencia.
    5. Virkola, Tuomo, 2014. "Exchange Rate Regime, Fiscal Foresight and the Effectiveness of Fiscal Policy in a Small Open Economy," ETLA Reports 20, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.
    6. Eric Sims & Jonathan Wolff, 2018. "The Output And Welfare Effects Of Government Spending Shocks Over The Business Cycle," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 59(3), pages 1403-1435, August.
    7. Charles J. Whalen & Felix Reichling, 2015. "The Fiscal Multiplier And Economic Policy Analysis In The United States," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 33(4), pages 735-746, October.
    8. Felix Reichling & Charles Whalen, 2015. "The Fiscal Multiplier and Economic Policy Analysis in the United States: Working Paper 2015-02," Working Papers 49925, Congressional Budget Office.
    9. Sebastian Gechert & Ansgar Rannenberg, 2014. "Are Fiscal Multipliers Regime-Dependent? A Meta Regression Analysis," IMK Working Paper 139-2014, IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute.
    10. Papaioannou, Sotiris K., 2019. "The effects of fiscal policy on output: Does the business cycle matter?," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 27-36.
    11. Agata Szymańska, 2018. "Wpływ polityki fiskalnej na PKB w krajach Unii Europejskiej spoza strefy euro," Gospodarka Narodowa. The Polish Journal of Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, issue 3, pages 49-74.
    12. Biolsi, Christopher, 2017. "Nonlinear effects of fiscal policy over the business cycle," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 54-87.
    13. Giancarlo Corsetti & André Meier & Gernot J. Müller, 2012. "What determines government spending multipliers? [Mafia and public spending: Evidence of the fiscal multiplier from a quasi-experiment’, mimeo]," Economic Policy, CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po;CES;MSH, vol. 27(72), pages 521-565.
    14. Felix Reichling & Charles Whalen, 2012. "Assessing the Short-Term Effects on Output of Changes in Federal Fiscal Policies: Working Paper 2012-08," Working Papers 43278, Congressional Budget Office.
    15. El Mostafa Bentour, 2022. "The effects of public debt accumulation and business cycle on government spending multipliers," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 54(19), pages 2231-2256, April.
    16. Efrem Castelnuovo & Guay Lim, 2019. "What Do We Know About the Macroeconomic Effects of Fiscal Policy? A Brief Survey of the Literature on Fiscal Multipliers," Australian Economic Review, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, vol. 52(1), pages 78-93, March.
    17. Hafedh Bouakez & Michel Guillard & Jordan Roulleau-Pasdeloup, 2017. "Public Investment, Time to Build, and the Zero Lower Bound," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 23, pages 60-79, January.
    18. James Cloyne & Òscar Jordà & Alan M. Taylor, 2020. "Decomposing the Fiscal Multiplier," Working Paper Series 2020-12, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    19. Atems, Bebonchu, 2019. "The effects of government spending shocks: Evidence from U.S. states," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 65-80.
    20. Sebastian Gechert, 2015. "What fiscal policy is most effective? A meta-regression analysis," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 67(3), pages 553-580.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:intecj:v:28:y:2013:i:2:p:255-271. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RIEJ20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.