Tag Archives: Stimulus

Do Banks Pass Through Credit Expansions? The Marginal Profitability of Consumer Lending During the Great Recession

From Sumit Agarwal, Souphala Chomsisengphet, Neale Mahoney, and Johannes Stroebel: The effect of bank-mediated stimulus on household borrowing depends on whether banks pass through credit expansions to households with a high marginal propensity to borrow (MPB). We use panel data on … Continue reading

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Are State Governments Roadblocks to Federal Stimulus? Evidence from Highway Grants in the 2009 Recovery Act

From Sylvain Leduc and Dan Wilson: We examine how state governments adjusted spending in response to the large temporary increase in federal grants under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). We concentrate our analysis on ARRA highway grants, which … Continue reading

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Larry Summers on “The Fiscal and Economic Effects of Austerity”

From Larry Summers: Thank you for the opportunity to speak before this committee. You have chosen to address issues relating to austerity at an opportune time as both our economic and our budget situations are in considerable flux and as … Continue reading

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Fiscal Policy and MPC Heterogeneity

Tullio Jappelli and Luigi Pistaferri have a recent paper called Fiscal Policy and MPC Heterogeneity. Here’s an interesting figure from it that shows how MPC varies by cash-on-hand: They aren’t the only ones who document MPC heterogeneity. Dynan, Skinner, Zeldes  have a … Continue reading

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Tax Cuts for Whom? Do tax changes for high income taxpayers generate more growth than similarly sized tax changes for lower income taxpayers?

        This figure, which is from a recently revised and submitted paper of mine, shows how the multiplier varies across the income distribution. It shows that equivalently sized tax changes for lower income groups have larger macroeconomic impacts on … Continue reading

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The Pace of the Recovery: Output and Employment Growth Since 1985

Laura Tyson has a piece today on the slow pace of the recovery: Since 2010, annual growth of gross domestic product has averaged about 2.1 percent. This is less than half the average pace of recoveries from previous recessions in … Continue reading

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Fiscal Policy and Economic Recovery: The Case of the 1936 Veterans’ Bonus

Josh Hausman, an economics job market candidate from Berkeley, has a guest post on Miles Kimball’s blog that’s worth checking out: An excellent historical analogy to Miles’s Federal Lines of Credit proposal are the 1931 loans to World War I veterans that I … Continue reading

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The Growing Burden of Payroll Taxes

Here’s a column on reforming the payroll tax that I wrote in NYTimes Economix today: Payroll taxes and corporate income taxes accounted for an equal share of federal tax revenue in 1969. By 2009, payroll taxes generated more than six times as much … Continue reading

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Christy Romer on the Effectiveness of the Recovery Act

The most successful of these studies focus on the variation in Recovery Act spending across states. Some of this variation resulted from differences in the recession’s severity. For example, there was much more spending on unemployment insurance in Michigan than … Continue reading

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Job Growth: Obama Recovery much better than Bush in Private Sector

To understand the competing claims about job growth under Obama and Bush, you really need to look at these two graphs (from Paul Krugman) that separate private and public employment. Key Points Private sector job growth is much more impressive … Continue reading

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