Counter-cyclical policy and political manipulation: An empirical analysis of Japanese government expenditures

Distinguishing accurately pure macroeconomic stabilization policies from election-motivated manipulations might be a difficult task within the framework of regression analysis. This paper attempts to demonstrate that the simple introduction of frequency-domain perspective provides a direct means of identifying portions of underlying components of Japanese public expenditures. We find that public investment behaves counter-cyclically over the business cycle, and not only public investment but also public consumption is manipulated for the House of Councillors elections.