EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Empirical Evidence on the Aggregate Effects of Anticipated and Unanticipated U.S. Tax Policy Shocks

Morten Ravn and Karel Mertens

No 7370, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We provide empirical evidence on the dynamic effects of tax liability changes in the United States. We distinguish between surprise and anticipated tax changes using a timing-convention. We document that pre-announced but not yet implemented tax cuts give rise to contractions in output, investment and hours worked while real wages increase. In contrast, there are no significant anticipation effects on aggregate consumption. Implemented tax cuts, regardless of their timing, have expansionary and persistent effects on output, consumption, investment, hours worked and real wages. Results are shown to be very robust. We argue that tax shocks are empirically important impulses to the U.S. business cycle and that anticipation effects have been important during several business cycle episodes.

Keywords: Anticipation effects; Business cycles; Fiscal policy; Tax liabilities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E20 E32 E62 H30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP7370 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Empirical Evidence on the Aggregate Effects of Anticipated and Unanticipated US Tax Policy Shocks (2012) Downloads
Chapter: Empirical Evidence on the Aggregate Effects of Anticipated and Unanticipated US Tax Policy Shocks (2010)
Working Paper: Empirical Evidence on the Aggregate Effects of Anticipated and Unanticipated U.S. Tax Policy Shocks (2010) Downloads
Working Paper: Empirical evidence on the aggregate effects of anticipated and unanticipated US tax policy shocks (2009) Downloads
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:cpr:ceprdp:7370

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP7370

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:7370