Does fiscal discipline restrain government from increasing its budget size? To answer this question, this paper investigates whether Wagner's law is satisfied for two types of states: U.S. states, in which fiscal sovereignty is established, and German states, in which fiscal transfer dependence...

It is commonly believed that public investments play a central role in Japan's discretionary fiscal policies, but the majority is implemented by local governments. After distinguishing between public investment by the central government and that by local governments, this paper utilizes wavelet...

This paper considers a simple model in which government spending is productive and has a complementary relationship with private consumption to study the response of the latter to government spending. We discuss how these two characteristics can yield empirical observations that indicate a...

This paper provides an explanation of the reason why previous works suggest that the effect of fiscal stimulus measure is, if any, small during the lost decades in Japan. To show this, it focuses on public investment by local governments which occupies a substantial portion of the total...

Given that Nordhaus' political business cycle theory is relevant at election cycle frequency and that its validity can change over time, we consider wavelet analysis especially suited to test the theory. For the postwar U.S. economy, we exploit wavelet methods to demonstrate whether there...

Predominant government behavior is decomposed by frequency into several periodic components: updating cycles of infrastructure, Kuznets cycles, fiscal policy over business cycles, and election cycles. Little is known, however, about the theoretical impact of such cyclical behavior in public...

The public sector has grown dramatically over the past few centuries in many developed countries. In this paper, we use wavelet methods to distinguish between two leading explanations for this growth—Wagner's law and the displacement effect. In doing so, we use the long-term data of ten OECD...

There are several candidate explanations for the Feldstein--Horioka puzzle. This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the relative role of the existing explanations for saving--investment comovement performing time-frequency domain analysis for nine countries from 1885 to 2010. The main...