The Benefits of Gradualism in Government Expenditure Changes: Theory and Experimental Evidence

Juergen von Hagen, Sebastian Kube, Johannes Kaiser, Reinhard Selten and Robin Pope

No 26/2006, Bonn Econ Discussion Papers from University of Bonn, Bonn Graduate School of Economics (BGSE)

Abstract: Government expenditure can be highly variable, if used as a countercyclical instrument, or as a response to economic crises or as a means of rapidly altering other features of the economy. An alternative policy setting is to keep government expenditure changes gradual and modest. It is shown that whether a more discretionary or a more stable usage of government expenditures better attains official sector macroeconomic goals is difficult to determine theoretically, in part because of missed risk effects. But the detecting which policy better meets the official sector macroeconomic goals from analysis of historical data or inter-country comparisons suffers from confounding events and institutions. This study offers a fresh insight from laboratory experiments. Our laboratory results favour gradualism in government expenditures, ie support the advocacy of more stable government expenditures offered in Friedman (1969), in Vernengo and Rochon (2000), and in the 2006 German tax change controversy, by that country?s local government sector.

Keywords: gradualism; shock therapy; discretionary or counter-cyclical government expenditure; laboratory experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B20 D80 D90 E60 E62 E69 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/22975/1/bgse26_2006.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:bonedp:262006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bonn Econ Discussion Papers from University of Bonn, Bonn Graduate School of Economics (BGSE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().