The Output and Welfare Effects of Government Spending Shocks over the Business Cycle

Eric Sims () and Jonathan Wolff

No 19749, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper studies the state-dependence of the output and welfare effects of shocks to government purchases in a canonical medium scale DSGE model. When monetary policy is characterized by a Taylor rule, the output multiplier (the change in output for a one unit change in government spending) is countercyclical but close to constant across states of the business cycle, whereas the welfare multiplier (the consumption equivalent change in a measure of aggregate welfare for the same change in government spending) is quite volatile and procyclical. These results are robust to different means of fiscal finance. When the nominal interest rate is unresponsive to economic conditions, such as would be the case at the zero lower bound, both the output and welfare multipliers are larger and move significantly more across states than under a Taylor rule. The welfare multiplier is still procyclical under passive monetary policy, albeit less so than under a Taylor rule.

JEL-codes: E0 E1 E2 E3 E31 E6 E62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-mac
Note: EFG ME
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published as Eric Sims & Jonathan Wolff, 2018. "THE OUTPUT AND WELFARE EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT SPENDING SHOCKS OVER THE BUSINESS CYCLE," International Economic Review, vol 59(3), pages 1403-1435.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19749.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: THE OUTPUT AND WELFARE EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT SPENDING SHOCKS OVER THE BUSINESS CYCLE (2018)
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:nbr:nberwo:19749

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19749

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().