Search Results
Showing results 1 to 6 of approximately 6.
(refine search)
Working Paper
Output fluctuations and fiscal policy : U.S. state and local governments 1978-1994
What are the cyclical properties of U.S. state and local government fiscal policy? The budget surplus of local and, in particular, state governments is procyclical, smoothing disposable income and consumption of state residents. This happens over both short- and medium-term horizons. Procyclical surpluses are the result of strongly procyclical revenues, and weakly procyclical expenditures. The budgets of trust funds and utilities are procyclical. Federal grants are procyclical, exacerbating the cyclical amplitude of state level income movements; although they smooth the idiosyncratic ...
Journal Article
Is state fiscal policy asymmetric over the business cycle?
A number of stabilizers are thought to mute the business cycle. One key stabilizer is federal fiscal policy. The federal budget surplus tends to rise during economic booms and fall in downturns, helping to stabilize consumers? disposable income and thereby mitigate economic fluctuations. During booms, for example, the budget surplus typically rises because tax revenues rise more than expenditures.> Another stabilizer that has traditionally received less attention is state fiscal policy. Like the federal budget surplus, state government surpluses tend to rise during economic expansions and ...
Journal Article
Is risk sharing in the United States a regional phenomenon?
Regions within the United States routinely experience economic fluctuations that differ from those of other regions. For example, in the past few years, falling wheat prices have slowed growth in the value of total output in Kansas. Such developments can pose concerns for policymakers because macroeconomic tools like monetary policy affect all regions, not just specific regions. Fortunately, several mechanisms help insulate regional income and consumption from region-specific output fluctuations. Diversification of asset ownership across regions, made possible by national capital markets, ...
Working Paper
Risk sharing and industrial specialization ; regional and international evidence
We provide empirical evidence that risk sharing enhances specialization in production. To the best of our knowledge, this well-established and important theoretical proposition has not been tested before. Our empirical procedure is summarized as follows. First, we construct a measure of specialization in production, and calculate an index of specialization for each of the European Community (EC) and non-EC OECD countries, U.S. states, Canadian provinces, Japanese prefectures, Latin American countries, and regions of Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Then, we estimate the degree of capital ...
Working Paper
Industrial specialization and the asymmetry of shocks across regions
Economic integration, through greater capital market integration, will induce higher regional specialization in production, rendering regional shocks less symmetric. To support this claim empirically, we develop a utility based measure of shock asymmetry and calculate it for each U.S. state. We regress it (using both ordinary least squares and instrumental variables) on a state-by-state 1-digit industrial specialization index and a 2-digit manufacturing specialization index, controlling for relevant economic and demographic variables. The main empirical result is that both specialization ...
Working Paper
Consumption and aggregate constraints : evidence from U.S. states and Canadian provinces
State-level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged income to the same extent as US aggregate data, but state-specific (idiosyncratic) consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged state-specific income---a result that also holds for Canadian provinces. We propose the following interpretation: borrowing and lending in response to changes in consumer demand is easier for an individual US state than it is for the US as a whole. The PIH may thus be a good model for describing the reaction of consumption to idiosyncratic disposable income shocks even if it fails at the ...