The comovement between monetary and fiscal policy instruments during the post-war period in the U.S

Jesús Vázquez

International Review of Economics & Finance, 2008, vol. 17, issue 3, 412-424

Abstract: This paper empirically studies the dynamic relationship between monetary and fiscal policies by analyzing the comovements between the Fed funds rate and the primary deficit/output ratio. Simple economic thinking establishes that a negative correlation between Fed rate and deficit arises whenever the two policy authorities share a common stabilization objective. However, when budget balancing concerns lead to a drastic deficit reduction the Fed may reduce the Fed rate in order to smooth the impact of fiscal policy, which results in a positive correlation between these two policy instruments. The empirical results show (i) a significant negative comovement between Fed rate and deficit and (ii) that deficit and output gap Granger-cause the Fed funds rate during the post-Volcker era, but the opposite is not true.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1059-0560(07)00004-4
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:reveco:v:17:y:2008:i:3:p:412-424

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Economics & Finance is currently edited by H. Beladi and C. Chen

More articles in International Review of Economics & Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().