Assessing the Effects of Fiscal Shocks

Craig Burnside, Martin Eichenbaum and Jonas Fisher

No 7459, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper investigates the response of real wages and hours worked to an exogenous shock in fiscal policy. We identify this shock with the dynamic response of government purchases and tax rates to an exogenous increase in military purchases. The fiscal shocks that we isolate are characterized by highly correlated increases in government purchases, tax rates and hours worked as well as persistent declines in real wages. We assess the ability of standard Real Business Cycle models to account for these facts. They can-but only under the assumption that marginal income tax rates are constant, a standard assumption in the literature. Once we abandon this counterfactual assumption, RBC models cannot account for the facts. We argue that our empirical findings pose a challenge to a wide class of business cycle models.

JEL-codes: E3 E6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
Note: EFG ME
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Published as Burnside, Craig, Martin Eichenbaum and Jonas Fisher. “Fiscal Shocks and Their Consequences." Journal of Economic Theory 115, 1 (2004): 89–117.

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Related works:
Working Paper: Assessing the Effects of Fiscal Shocks (2000)
Working Paper: Assessing the effects of fiscal shocks (1999)
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