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...

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...

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...

This paper examines the cyclicality of Japanese public investment for the prefectural-level business cycles as well as for the aggregate ones. We estimate the public investment reaction function, in which regional business cycles are explicitly discriminated from national business fluctuations...

This article re-examines the existence of opportunistic political monetary cycle in the United States using frequency-domain analysis. We reveal the cyclical propensity that expansionary monetary policy emerges prior to the presidential elections.

Distinguishing accurately pure macroeconomic stabilization policies from election-motivated manipulations might be a difficult task within the framework of regression analysis. This paper attempts to demonstrate that the simple introduction of frequency-domain perspective provides a direct means...

Using Japanese macroeconomic data over 1980:Q1-2010:Q1, we estimate their time-varying seasonal components and investigate the impact of public investment smoothing on the construction industry. It is shown that the seasonal fluctuations of public investment had faded away after the collapse of...