EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Wagner's hypothesis: a local perspective

Randall Eberts and Timothy Gronberg ()

No 9202, Working Papers (Old Series) from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Abstract: Wagner's hypothesis of an expanding public sector as an economy develops is tested using pooled time-series cross-sectional data for U.S. states from 1964 to 1986. Comparing government size among fiscal jurisdictions within a single nation reduces the problems of data comparability and of controlling for cultural and institutional differences that plague the more common international tests of this theory. Our results are inconsistent with Wagner's hypothesis, yielding a negative relationship between public-sector size and output. However, some empirical support is found in the protective services and public welfare components of government activity.

Keywords: Expenditures; Public (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1992
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/scribd/?item_id=4945 ... 2-02.pdf#scribd-open Full text (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:fip:fedcwp:9202

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers (Old Series) from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:fip:fedcwp:9202