Essays on fiscal policy
- Autores: Dimitrios Bermperoglou
- Directores de la Tesis: Evi Pappa (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2015
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Fabio Canova (presid.), Stefano Gnocchi (secret.), Stefano Neri (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Resumen
This thesis contributes to three important issues relating to fiscal policy and its short-run effects on the real economy.
The first chapter investigates how housing wealth dynamics and collateral constraints jointly matter for the non-linear transmission of fiscal policy shocks. A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with housing investment and occasionally binding collateral constraints reveals a non-linear pattern of responses to fiscal shocks: positive government consumption shocks are more expansionary during times that housing wealth is relatively high and the collateral constraint is slack, while tax cuts are more expansionary during times that housing wealth is low and the collateral constraint binds.
In the second chapter, we compare output, unemployment and deficit effects of fiscal adjustments in different types of government outlays in the US, Canada, Japan, and the UK. Shocks to government consumption, investment, employment and wages are identified in a structural VAR, using sign restrictions from a sticky price DSGE model with matching frictions in the private and public sector, endogenous labor participation and heterogeneous unemployed jobseekers. Government employment cuts induce the highest output losses, the smallest deficit reductions and significant unemployment increases in the US and the UK. On the other hand, wage cuts generate the lowest output and unemployment losses, and typically the highest deficit gains.
The last part studies the effects of disaggregated fiscal policy on the trade balance and the real exchange rate. Structural VAR estimations reveal distinct patterns for all shocks. Government (non-wage) consumption and investment shocks induce a fall in private consumption, a real depreciation and an improvement of the US trade balance. Public employment shocks lead to an increase in private consumption, a real depreciation and an improvement of the US net exports. Finally, public wage shocks induce a decline in private consumption, a real appreciation and a deterioration of the trade balance. A two-country DSGE model with frictions in the labor market and complete international financial markets can replicate satisfactorily the empirical responses to government employment and wage shocks. However, a correlation puzzle emerges for public consumption and investment shocks: a fall in private consumption as a response to those shocks is accompanied by a real depreciation in the data, while it is accompanied by a real appreciation in theory.
