No abstract

This paper examines issues related to the estimation of the government spending multiplier (GSM) in a DSGE context. We stress a source of bias in the GSM arising from the combination of endogenous government expenditures and Edgeworth complementarity between private consumption and government expenditures. Due to cross-equation restrictions, omitting the endogenous component of government policy at the estimation stage would lead an econometrician to underestimate the degree of Edgeworth complementarity and, consequently, the long-run GSM. An estimated version of our model with US postwar data shows that this bias matters quantitatively. The results are robust to a number of perturbations. (JEL E13, E23, E32, E62, H50)

No abstract

We thank Mario Forni, Luca Gambetti and Luca Sala for sharing their codes and data and for their comments. Paul Beaudry would like to a knowledge financial support from the Social Science and Research Council of Canada. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

In this paper, we propose a simple econometric framework to disentangle the respective roles of monetary policy inertia and persistent shocks in interest rate rules. We exploit the restrictions of a DSGE model that is confronted with a monetary SVAR. We show that, provided enough informative variables are included in the formal test, the data favor a monetary policy representation with modest inertia and highly serially correlated monetary shocks. To the contrary, when the procedure is based solely on the dynamic behavior of the nominal interest rate, no clear-cut conclusion can be reached about the correct representation of monetary policy.

This paper examines issues related to the estimation of the government spending multiplier (GSM) in a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium context. We stress a potential source of bias in the GSM arising from the combination of Edgeworth complementarity/substitutability between private consumption and government expenditures and endogenous government expenditures. Due to crossequation restrictions, omitting the endogenous component of government policy at the estimation stage would lead an econometrician to underestimate the degree of Edgeworth complementarity and, consequently, the long-run GSM. An estimated version of our model with US postwar data shows that this bias matters quantitatively. The results prove to be robust to a number of perturbations.

No abstract

No abstract