Empirical Analysis of the Effect of Fiscal Policy Shocks in China

The central issues concerning fiscal policy makers include macroeconomic stability and growth stimulation. The policy decision process is facilitated by investigation on the effects of fiscal policy, such as a change in government spending or taxes on macroeconomic variables comprising inflation, aggregate output, and interest rates. Build on the Blanchard-Perotti identification approach, this paper empirically analyses the influence of fiscal policy to aggregate economic activities in China, and the estimated results are compared between China and the advanced economies. The findings demonstrate that the impulse responses incurred by tax shocks are generally stimulative, although government spending shocks tend to be neutral, revealing meaningful implications for the fiscal space and policy design.

The Macroeconomic Effects of Income and Consumption Tax Changes

This paper estimates the effects of exogenous changes in income and consumption taxes. The tax shocks are proxied with a narrative account of tax liability changes in the United Kingdom. Income tax cuts have large effects on GDP, private consumption, and investment. The effects of consumption tax cuts are modest and not statistically significant on GDP and its components. Shifting the burden of taxation from income to consumption is expansionary. Consistent with conventional public finance theories, these results indicate that it is crucial to distinguish between direct and indirect taxation when studying the transmission mechanism of fiscal policy. (JEL E21, E22, E23, H24, H25)

Dynamics of Public Policy on Economic Activity: The Case of Pakistan

The unanticipated domestic and international changes in conjunction with policy discretion become reason for shocks to overall economy that affect overall economic growth. Based on methodology by Blanchard and Perotti (2002) the study used timing of fiscal decisions in a Structural Vector Auto-Regression (SVAR) to map dynamics of shocks due to tax revenue, government expenditures and aggregate output in Pakistan. When tax decisions precede expenditure decision, the tax shocks have a volatile short run impact causing expenditures to sharply adjust. Expenditure shocks persistently increase tax revenues and government expenditures. But in the second specification, expenditure shocks reduce the tax revenue and aggregate output that reverts to equilibrium only in the long run. The response of output shocks is almost identical for both the scenarios. Therefore, growth in output increases taxes collection in Pakistan enabling better management of burden of debt and deficit.

International spillover effects of U.S. tax reforms: evidence from Germany

This paper explores the international transmission of U.S. tax shocks. Using structural vector autoregressions, we study the impact on the German economy and on German tax legislation. Our results suggest that, after a U.S. tax cut, German GDP increases only moderately. Positive effects via the income channel outweigh negative effects stemming from price developments. Significant changes in the transmission channels arise by distinguishing between the types of the U.S. tax shock. German tax policy either reacts with diametric measures, or remains passive when considering the whole sample period. For a sample starting in 1980, we find that, in particular, after U.S. corporate income tax cuts, tax reductions are also implemented in Germany.

The Aging of the Baby Boomers: Demographics and Propagation of Tax Shocks

We study how the changing demographic composition of the US labor force has affected the response of the unemployment rate to marginal tax rate shocks. Using narratively identified tax changes as proxies for structural shocks, we establish that the responsiveness of the unemployment rates to tax changes varies significantly across age groups: the unemployment rate response of the young is nearly twice as large as that of the old. This heterogeneity is the channel through which shifts in the age composition of the labor force impact the response of the unemployment rate to tax cuts. We find that the aging of the baby boomers considerably reduces the effects of tax cuts on aggregate unemployment. (JEL E24, E62, H24, H31, J21)