Women and Budget Deficits*

Optimal Budget Deficits

Do Budget Deficits Cause Inflation ?

In 2004, the federal budget deficit stood at $412 billion and reached 4.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Though not at a record level, the deficit as a fraction of GDP is now the largest since the early 1980s. Moreover, the recent swing from surplus to deficit is the largest since the end of World War II (Figure 1). The flip side of deficit spending is that the amount of government de...

Budget deficits, inflation risk, and asset prices

Kitchen examines how US budget deficit news affects asset prices and concludes that news of lower deficits reduces the inflation risk premium. This paper constructs narrative histories of several deficit-reduction laws to identify when markets learned that deficits would fall. It then estimates a multi-factor model that allows the inflation risk premium to vary following news of deficit-reducti...

Twin Deficits An empirical analysis on the relationship between budget deficits and trade deficits in Argentina

The majority of existing literature on the twin deficits hypothesis focuses on its effects in economies already well developed. The theory suggests that there is a causal relationship between the budget deficit and trade deficit of a nation, a claim often debated in the economic community. This paper attempts to supplement existing literature by examining the causal relationship between budget ...

Commentary: What Do Budget Deficits Do?

The title of Ball and Mankiw’s paper asks: What Do Budget Deficits Do? One answer to that question is a restatement on the pure theory of debt-financed budget deficits. An alternative answer would develop the effects on the U.S. or world economies on the assumption that the U.S. federal government balances its budget by reducing spending, instead of raising tax rates, or running deficits equal ...