Using Macro Counterfactuals to Assess Plausibility: An Illustration using the 2001 Rebate MPCs

Jacob D Orchard, Valerie A Ramey and Johannes F Wieland

The Economic Journal, 2026, vol. 136, issue 673, 1-25

Abstract: Macroeconomics has increasingly adopted tools from the applied micro ‘credibility revolution’ to estimate micro parameters that can inform macro questions. In this paper, we argue that researchers should take advantage of this confluence of micro and macro to take the credibility revolution one step further. We argue that researchers should assess the plausibility of the micro estimates and macro models by constructing macro counterfactuals for historical periods and comparing these counterfactuals with reasonable benchmarks. We illustrate this approach by conducting a case study of the 2001 US tax rebates, as well as briefly summarising four other applications of the methodology. In the 2001 rebate case, we calibrate a two-good, two-agent New Keynesian model with the leading estimates of the household marginal propensity to consume out of the rebates to construct a counterfactual path for non-durable goods consumption. The counterfactual path implies that without the tax rebate non-durable goods consumption spending would have fallen dramatically in the late summer and fall of 2001. Using forecasting regressions and other evidence, we argue that this counterfactual is implausible. When we investigate the source of the discrepancy, we find that the leading marginal-propensity-to-consume estimates are not representative of the response of total consumption.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueaf039 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:econjl:v:136:y:2026:i:673:p:1-25.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().