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Copyright of OECD Economics Department Working Papers / Documents de Travail du Département des Affaires Économiques de l'OCDE is the property of Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

"Big G" typically refers to aggregate government spending on a homogeneous good. In this paper, we open up this construct by analyzing the entire universe of procurement contracts of the US government and establish five facts. First, government spending is granular; that is, it is concentrated in relatively few firms and sectors. Second, relative to private expenditures its composition is biased. Third, procurement contracts are short-lived. Fourth, idiosyncratic variation dominates the fluctuation in spending. Last, government spending is concentrated in sectors with relatively sticky prices. Accounting for these facts within a stylized New Keynesian model offers new insights into the fiscal transmission mechanism: fiscal shocks hardly impact inflation, little crowding out of private expenditure exists, and the multiplier tends to be larger compared to a one-sector benchmark, aligning the model with the empirical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how government spending multipliers depend on the distribution of taxes across households. We exploit historical variations in the financing of spending in the U.S. since 1913 to show that multipliers are positive only when financed with more progressive taxes, and zero otherwise. We rationalize this finding within a heterogeneous-household model with indivisible labor supply. The model results in a lower labor responsiveness to tax changes for higher-income earners. In turn, spending financed with more progressive taxes induces a smaller crowding-out, and thus larger multipliers. Finally, we provide evidence in support of the model's cross-sectional implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the implications of distortionary taxation and debt financing for optimal government spending policy in a sticky-price economy where the nominal interest rate is subject to the zero lower bound constraint. Regardless of the type of tax available and the initial debt level, optimal government spending policy in a recession is characterized by an initial increase followed by a reduction below, and an eventual return to, the steady state. The magnitude of variations in the government spending as well as their welfare implications depend importantly on the available tax instrument and the initial debt level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the implications of distortionary taxation and debt financing for optimal government spending policy in a sticky-price economy where the nominal interest rate is subject to the zero lower bound constraint. Regardless of the type of tax available and the initial debt level, optimal government spending policy in a recession is characterized by an initial increase followed by a reduction below, and an eventual return to, the steady state. The magnitude of variations in the government spending as well as their welfare implications depend importantly on the available tax instrument and the initial debt level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We revisit the macroeconomic effects of government consumption in the neoclassical growth model when agents face uninsured idiosyncratic investment risk. Under complete markets, a permanent increase in government consumption has no long-run effect on the interest rate and the capital-labor ratio, while it increases hours due to the negative wealth effect. These results are upset once we allow for incomplete markets. The same negative wealth effect now causes a reduction in risk taking and the demand for investment. This leads to a lower risk-free rate and, under certain conditions, also to a lower capital-labor ratio, and lower productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent evidence on the effect of government spending shocks on consumption cannot be easily reconciled with existing optimizing business cycle models. We extend the standard New Keynesian model to allow for the presence of rule-of-thumb (non-Ricardian) consumers. We show how the interaction of the latter with sticky prices and deficit financing can account for the existing evidence on the effects of government spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]