Measuring the effects of discretionary fiscal policy is both difficult and controversial, as some explicit or implicit identifying assumptions need to be made to isolate exogenous and unanticipated changes in taxes and government spending. Studies based on structural vector autoregressions...

Durable goods pose a challenge for standard sticky-price models because the near constancy of their shadow value and their apparent price flexibility lead to perverse and counterfactual economic implications, such as the tendency of the durables and nondurables sectors to move in opposite...