This paper provides an introduction to the practice of forecasting exogenous components of federal government taxes and spending-policy actions, for short - in the United States. First, we estimate simple models of defense expenditures that are useful for constructing current-quarter forecasts...

In the late 1970s, many economists argued that the deleterious effects of inflation on the user cost of capital for U.S. firms were large. Since that time, the tax code has changed, the level of inflation has dropped significantly, and the of investment has evolved considerably. In this paper,...

On March 9th, President Bush signed the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002. The Act included a temporary increase in depreciation allowances for business spending on equipment and software (Eamp;S) in the form of 30 percent partial expensing. In this paper we explore the impact of...

This paper examines how business investment responded to temporary partial expensing, first enacted in 2002 and expanded in 2003. In principle, partial expensing boosted the incentive to invest which should have had a discernable impact on spending. However, the tax changes did not occur in a...

This paper offers a new framework for analyzing aggregate sales of new motor vehicles that incorporates separate models for the change in the vehicle stock and for the rate of vehicle scrappage. Because this approach requires only a minimal set of assumptions about demographic trends, the state...

In an analysis of the value of growth and stabilization of consumption, Robert Lucas presents a stunning set of calculations implying that a permanent increase in the growth rate of consumption of only one-tenth percentage point per year is worth nearly 50 times as much to consumers as complete...