This paper takes stock of what we have learned from the "Renaissance" in fiscal research in the ten years since the financial crisis. I first summarize the new innovations in methodology and discuss the various strengths and weaknesses of the main approaches. Reviewing the estimates, I come to...

A key question that has arisen during recent debates is whether government spending multipliers are larger during times when resources are idle. This paper seeks to shed light on this question by analyzing new quarterly historical data covering multiple large wars and depressions in the U.S. and...

This paper asks whether increases in government spending stimulate private activity. The first part of the paper studies private spending. Using a variety of identification methods and samples, I find that in most cases private spending falls significantly in response to an increase in...

We analyze whether government spending multipliers differ by the sign of the shock. Using aggregate historical U.S. data, we apply Ben Zeev's (2020) nonlinear diagnostic tests and find evidence of nonlinearities in the impulse response functions of both government spending and GDP. We then...

This chapter reviews and synthesizes our current understanding of the shocks that drive economic fluctuations. The chapter begins with an illustration of the problem of identifying macroeconomic shocks, followed by an overview of the many recent innovations for identifying shocks. It then...