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This paper shows that part of what is usually labelled discretionary government spending actually varies systematically over the cycle. I exploit the pervasive gap between ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares local government spending multipliers to estimate how cyclical the systematic part of government spending is. Estimating a structural open-economy New Keynesian model on United States state-level data, I find that when employment decreases by $1\%$, the systematic component of government spending decreases by $0.23\%$. I also find that the empirical specification in Nakamura and Steinsson, ‘Fiscal Stimulus in a monetary union’ (American Economic Review, 2014) does a good job in recovering the true impact multiplier effect, but that it overestimates the long-run cumulative effect.

We study optimal fiscal policy in an economy plunged into a deep recession characterized by a liquidity trap, and in which the government can allocate spending both to consumption and investment goods. Public investment increases the stock of public capital subject to a time-to-build constraint. The zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate binds as a result of a large shock that increases households’ desire to save in the risk-free asset, pushing the natural rate of interest below zero. Under nominal rigidities and sub-optimal monetary policy, the shock leads to a large decline in private consumption and investment. We show that the optimal response to such a shock is to temporarily raise public spending above the level that would be dictated by classical principles, and to tilt its composition towards public investment. This compositional shift lasts well after the natural rate has ceased to be negative. Our results suggest that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was insufficiently oriented towards public investment.

I study the impact of a government spending shock in a New Keynesian model when monetary policy is set optimally. In this framework, the economy is at the Zero Lower Bound but expectations are well managed by the Central Bank. As such, the multiplier effect of government spending increases on expected inflation is small while the one on output can be larger than one. This is consistent with recent empirical evidence on the effects of the 2009 ARRA.

Should one expect inflation to be stable when monetary policy is passive? According to the workhorse model for monetary policy analysis, the answer should be no if the passive spell is too long. In this paper, I develop a New Keynesian model in which monetary policy is optimal subject to a loose commitment constraint. I show that there is a threshold degree of commitment such that the equilibrium is locally unique when monetary policy switches between active and passive stances, regardless of the length of the passive spell. This result also holds for a version of the model where the passive spell is endogenous and due to a demand shock driving the economy to the Zero Lower Bound.

We document the existence of a "missing deflation" puzzle during the U.S. Great Depression (1929-1941) and show that the solution of this puzzle lies in Hoover policies. Herbert Hoover made multiple public announcements asking firms not to cut wages, most of which complied. The consequences of such a policy are ambiguous since it affects aggregate fluctuations via two channels: as a negative aggregate supply shock this policy decreases output while increasing inflation, but more inflation can postpone the occurrence of a liquidity trap when the economy is hit by a large negative aggregate demand shock. We develop and estimate a medium scale New Keynesian model to measure the effect of Hoover policies during the Great Depression and we find evidence that without such polices the U.S. economy would have ended up in a liquidity trap two years before it actually did, suffering an even deeper recession with a larger deflation. In addition, the welfare effects of Hoover policy are found to be clearly positive.

International audience; We study the effectiveness of public investment in stimulating an economy stuck in a liquidity trap. We do so in the context of a tractable new-Keynesian economy in which a fraction of government spending increases the stock of public capital subject to a time-to-build constraint. Public investment projects typically entail significant time-to-build delays, which often span several years from approval to completion. We show that this feature implies that the spending multiplier associated with public investment can be substantially large — nearly twice as large as the multiplier associated with public consumption — in a liquidity trap. Intuitively, when the time to build is sufficiently long, and to the extent that public capital raises the marginal productivity of private inputs, the resulting disinflationary effect will occur after the economy has escaped from the liquidity trap. At the same time, the increase in households' expected wealth amplifies aggregate demand while the economy is still in the liquidity trap. Using a medium-scale model extended to allow for the accumulation of public capital, we quantify the multiplier associated with the spending component of the 2009's ARRA, which allocated roughly 40% of the authorized funds to public investment. We find a peak multiplier of 2.31. Our results also indicate that failing to account for the composition of the stimulus by overlooking its investment component would lead one to underestimate the spending multiplier by about 50%. © 2016 Elsevier Inc.

Public investment represents a non-negligible fraction of total public expenditures. Yet, theoretical studies of the effects of public spending when the economy is stuck in a liquidity trap invariably assume that government expenditures are entirely wasteful. In this paper, we consider a new-Keynesian economy in which a fraction of government spending increases the stock of public capital–which is an external input in the production technology–subject to a time-to-build constraint. In this environment, an increase in public spending has two conflicting effects on current and expected inflation: a positive effect due to higher aggregate demand and a negative effect reflecting future declines in real marginal cost. We solve the model analytically both in normal times and when the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates binds. We show that under relatively short time-to-build delays, the spending multiplier at the ZLB decreases with the fraction of public investment in a stimulus plan. Conversely, when several quarters are required to build new public capital, this relationship is reversed. In the limiting case where a fiscal stimulus is entirely allocated to investment in public infrastructure, the spending multiplier at the ZLB is 4 to 5 times larger than in normal times when the time to build is 12 quarters

We investigate the size of the multiplier at the ZLB in a New Keynesian model. It ranges from around −0.25 to +1.5, depending on the extent to which the government spending is productive, substitutable or not for private consumption.

Recently, a series of papers have argued that output multipliers of government spending can be potentially large during times when the Zero Lower Bound on nominal interest rates is binding (Christiano et al. (2011)). This literature generally considers "excess-savings" liquidity traps and identifies the reaction of real interest rates —that follows the effect of government purchases on marginal cost and, hence, inflation —as the main channel of propagation. Here, I show that taking explicitly into account the fact that government spending is productive can mitigate this result. The higher the share of productive government spending in total stimulus spending, the lower the gap between the government spending multipliers in and out of the Zero Lower Bound. Furthermore, a sufficient share of productive government spending in total stimulus spending will imply a higher multiplier when the Zero Lower Bound is not binding. It follows that the government spending multiplier need not be unusually large when the economy is in an "excess-savings" liquidity trap. In a "expectationsdriven" liquidity trap (Mertens & Ravn (2010)) however, the government spending multiplier will be larger than in normal times for a sufficient share of productive government spending. But for this to happen, a rise in inflation is still needed. While the predictions of the model with an "expectations-driven" liquidity trap are difficult to compare with the data, I show that the model with an "excess-savings" liquidity trap is at odds with recent empirical evidence on the behavior of key macroeconomic variables in a recession. In contrast, the simple New-keynesian model augmented with a sufficient share of productive government spending is qualitatively consistent with aforementioned evidence.

We implement a recently developed econometric model, the Factor Augmented VAR (FAVAR), to investigate the dynamic effects of government spending on key macroeconomic variables. In line with existing literature, we find that a government spending shock has positive effects on consumption and output. By splitting the sample in a pre-and post- Volcker period, we find that the positive effects of government spending on consumption and output over the whole sample are largely due to the first part of the sample.