Structural Breaks in Public Infrastructure Investment in the U.S

Alfredo Marvao Pereira () and Martin B. Schmidt ()

No 55, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: In this paper we address empirically the issue of the possible structural breaks in the public infrastructure investment series with the objective of identifying the existence and determining the timing of such breaks. Both heuristic and more formal tests suggest that a break in the mean of public investment occurred in the late 1970s or early 1980s. This is true for public infrastructure investment at the aggregate level as well as for most types of public infrastructures. We regard this evidence as the first step in the process of revisiting the analysis of the effects of such infrastructure investments in a VAR approach accounting for the presence of structural breaks.

Keywords: public investment; infrastructure; structural breaks; VAR modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 E62 H54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-pbe
Date: 2007-08-24
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