This paper investigates how tax changes for different income groups affect aggregate economic activity. I construct a measure of who received (or paid for) tax changes in the postwar period using tax return data from NBER's TAXSIM. I aggregate each tax change by income group and state. Variation...

This paper investigates whether U.S. government spending multipliers differ according to two potentially important features of the economy: (1) the amount of slack and (2) whether interest rates are near the zero lower bound. We shed light on these questions by analyzing new quarterly historical...

From the early 1950s to the early 1990s, increases in Social Security benefits in the United States varied widely in size and timing, and were only rarely undertaken in response to short-run macroeconomic developments. This paper uses these benefit increases to investigate the macroeconomic...

If there was any time to expect a large peace-time multiplier effect from federal spending in the states, it would have been during the period from 1930 through 1940. Interest rates were near the zero bound, and unemployment rates never fell below 10 percent and there was ample idle capacity. We...

The hypothesis that decreases in taxes reduce future government spending is often cited as a reason for cutting taxes. However, because taxes change for many reasons, examinations of the relationship between overall measures of taxation and subsequent spending are plagued by problems of reverse...

This paper investigates the impact of changes in the level of taxation on economic activity. We use the narrative record -- presidential speeches, executive-branch documents, and Congressional reports -- to identify the size, timing, and principal motivation for all major postwar tax policy...

The paper provides a survey of fiscal and monetary policies during the 1930s under the Hoover and Roosevelt Administrations and how they influenced the policies during the recent Great Recession. The discussion of the causal impacts of monetary policy focuses on papers written in the last decade...

A principal reason that losses from catastrophic risks have been increasing over time is that more individuals and firms are locating in harm's way while not taking appropriate protective measures. Several behavioural biases lead decision-makers not to invest in adaptation measures until after...

International surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate. At the same time, social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate...

How much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing labor income taxes? In this paper we provide a quantitative answer to this question, and study the importance of the progressivity of the tax schedule for the ability of the government to generate tax revenues. We develop...