Suchergebnisse

A series of discontinuities in the allocation mechanism of federal transfers, to municipal governments in Brazil allow us to identify the causal effect of public spending on local labor markets, using a 'fuzzy' Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD). Our estimates imply a cost per job of about 8,000 US dollars per year and a local income multiplier around two. The effect comes mostly from employment in services and is more pronounced among less financially developed municipalities.

A two-country business cycle model featuring nominal rigidities, countercyclical mark-ups, rule of thumb consumers and government spending reversals is used to identify inequality predictions that are robust across a range of empirically plausible parameterizations. These robust inequality restrictions are imposed onto a regime-change factor model for the United States and its main trade partners to estimate the international fiscal spillovers. The effects of U.S. government spending on foreign real activity are found to be sizable and significant, operating mainly by lowering real interest rates rather than boosting trade balances. In contrast, there seems to be only limited evidence of state dependence in the international transmission of fiscal policy.

The top quartile of the income distribution accounts for almost half of the pandemic-related decline in aggregate consumption, with expenditure for this group falling much more than income. In contrast, the bottom quartile of the income distribution has seen the smallest spending cuts and the largest earnings drop but their total incomes have fallen by much less because of the increase in government benefits. The decline in consumers' spending preceded the introduction of the lockdown, whose partial lifting has triggered a stronger recovery in sectors with a lower contact rate. The largest spending contractions are concentrated in the most affluent regions. These conclusions are based on detailed high-frequency transaction data on spending, earnings and income from a large fintech company in the United Kingdom.