Due to the complex nature of fiscal policy decisions and implementations, fiscal vector autoregressive models have suffered from an underidentification problem that has caused substantial debate about measuring the efficacy of fiscal stimulus. To help resolve this issue this paper incorporates additional information regarding how private agents’ anticipation of fiscal adjustment in the short an...

BACKGROUND Government spending on health from domestic sources is an important indicator of a government's commitment to the health of its people, and is essential for the sustainability of health programmes. We aimed to systematically analyse all data sources available for government spending on health in developing countries; describe trends in public financing of health; and test the extent ...

The ability of voters to monitor government officials is complicated by the large changes in government spending caused by the business cycle. Voters may be uncertain about the cumulative effect of changes in spending that occur over several years, and thus budget allocations may be different from voters’ ideal. For the years 1989 through 2006, we examine states’ responses to revenue shocks, wh...

In this paper we examine how model uncertainty due to the preference for robustness (RB) affects optimal taxation and the evolution of debt in the Barro tax-smoothing model (1979). We first study how the government spending shocks are absorbed in the short run by varying taxes or through debt under RB. Furthermore, we show that introducing RB improves the model’s predictions by generating (i) t...

Recent empirical work finds that government spending shocks can cause aggregate consumption to increase. This paper builds on the framework of imperfect information in Lucas (1972) and Lorenzoni (2009) to show how government spending can stimulate consumption. Owners of firms targeted by an increase in government spending perceive an increase in their permanent income relative to their future t...