期刊名称：Euro Area Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Statistics
印刷版ISSN：1830-3420
电子版ISSN：1830-3439
出版年度：2008
卷号：1
出版社：European Central Bank
摘要：The empirical literature using vector autoregressive models to assess the e¤ects of scal policy shocks strongly disagrees on even the qualitative response of key macro- economic variables to government spending and tax shocks. We provide new evidence for the U.S. over the period 1955-2006. We show that, controlling for di¤erences in speci cation of the reduced-form model, all identi cation approaches used in the liter- ature yield qualitatively and quantitatively very similar results as regards government spending shocks. In response to such shocks real GDP, real private consumption and the real wage all signi cantly increase following a hump-shaped pattern, while private employment does not react. In contrast, we nd strongly diverging results as regards the e¤ects of tax shocks, with the estimated e¤ects ranging from non-distortionary to strongly distortionary. The di¤erences in results can to a large extent be traced back to di¤erences in the size of automatic stabilizers estimated or calibrated for alternative identi cation approaches. These di¤erences also translate into uncertainty about the e¤ects of policy experiments typically considered in theoretical models.
