In the late 1970s, many economists argued that the deleterious effects of inflation on the user cost of capital for U.S. firms were large. Since that time, the tax code has changed, the level of inflation has dropped significantly, and the of investment has evolved considerably. In this paper,...

This paper examines how business investment responded to temporary partial expensing, first enacted in 2002 and expanded in 2003. In principle, partial expensing boosted the incentive to invest which should have had a discernable impact on spending. However, the tax changes did not occur in a...

This paper provides an introduction to the practice of forecasting exogenous components of federal government taxes and spending-policy actions, for short - in the United States. First, we estimate simple models of defense expenditures that are useful for constructing current-quarter forecasts...

The paper examines the properties of standard data transformations - such as growth rates and moving averages-used by applied economists. Because many resources are devoted to understanding the economic significance of incoming data by government and financial-market economists, for example,...