Changes in fiscal policy typically entail two kinds of lags: the legislative lag--between when legislation is proposed and when it is signed into law--and the implementation lag--from when a new fiscal law is enacted and when it takes effect. These lags imply that substantial time evolves...

Legislative and implementation lags imply that substantial time evolves between when news arrives about fiscal changes and when the changes actually take place -- time when households and firms can adjust their behavior. We identify two types of fiscal news -- government spending using the...

News - or foresight - about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non-fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react. Using tax policies as a leading...

This paper contributes to the debate about fiscal multipliers by studying the impacts of government investment in conventional neoclassical growth models. The analysis focuses on two dimensions of fiscal policy that are critical for understanding the effects of government investment:...

We use a rational expectations framework to assess the implications of rising debt in an environment with a "fiscal limit." The fiscal limit is defined as the point where the government no longer has the ability to finance higher debt levels by increasing taxes, so either an adjustment to fiscal...

Bayesian prior predictive analysis of five nested DSGE models suggests that model specifications and prior distributions tightly circumscribe the range of possible government spending multipliers. Multipliers are decomposed into wealth and substitution effects, yielding uniform comparisons...

News - or foresight - about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non-fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react. Using tax policies as a leading...

Effects of government investment are studied in an estimated neoclassical growth model. The analysis focuses on two dimensions that are critical for understanding government investment as a fiscal stimulus: implementation delays for building public capital and expected fiscal adjustments to...