 Public investment, debt, and welfare: A quantitative analysisSantanu Chatterjee (), John Gibson () and Felix Rioja Journal of Macroeconomics, 2018, vol. 56, issue C, 204-217 Abstract: In this paper, we examine the relationship between infrastructure investment and economic welfare in the context of a heterogeneous agent, incomplete-markets economy. Using a quantitative model to match the key aggregate and distributional features of the U.S. economy over the period 1990–2015, we show that the welfare-maximizing share of public investment in GDP depends critically on whether one internalizes the transition path between stationary equilibria or not. When welfare changes are evaluated by only comparing long-run stationary equilibria, the model implies that the government should increase infrastructure investment above its average share of 4 percent of GDP in the data. However, once the transition path and short-run dynamics are internalized, welfare-maximization generates an intertemporal trade-off in the path of infrastructure spending: a short-run increase significantly above its observed share in the data, but a long-run decline below this share to satisfy the government’s budget constraint. Keywords: Infrastructure; Public investment; Heterogeneous agents; Public debt; Welfare; Transitional dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jmacro:v:56:y:2018:i:c:p:204-217 DOI: 10.1016/j.jmacro.2018.01.007 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Macroeconomics is currently edited by Douglas McMillin and Theodore Palivos More articles in Journal of Macroeconomics from Elsevier |
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