US state-level economic freedom during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic led to extensive new government regulations and lockdown policies that significantly reduced economic freedom across US states. Many of these new pandemic-related regulatory restrictions on economic freedom varied significantly from state to state but are largely missed by the existing Economic Freedom of North America Report (EFNA). This paper adjusts the Our World in Data COVID-19 Stringency Index into a state-level measure of lockdown regulatory freedom and then merges it into the EFNA index to better measure relative economic freedom across US states in 2020. We find significant differences in the relative ranking of economic freedom between states once we adjust for lockdown regulatory restrictions.     

Military spending and entrepreneurship: Spatial effects of cross‐country spillovers

This paper uses a large cross‐country panel data sample to examine the effects of military spending on entrepreneurship. The other major contribution of this work lies in studying the spatial cross‐country influences of military spending on entrepreneurship. Placing the econometric model in the broader literature on the determinants of entrepreneurship, results show that while own military spending crowds out entrepreneurship in a country, bordering military spending promotes entrepreneurship. In other findings, we find interesting contrasts between the effects of government size and government quality, and between economic freedom and political freedom.     

Private debt overhang and the government spending multiplier: Evidence for the United States

Using state‐dependent local projections and historical US data, we find that government spending multipliers are considerably larger in periods of private debt overhang. In particular, while multipliers are below or close to one in low private debt states, we find significant crowding‐in of private spending in periods of debt overhang, resulting in multipliers that are much larger than one. In high private debt episodes, more government purchases even reduce the ratio of government debt to gross domestic product. These results are robust for the type of shocks, and when we control for the business cycle, financial crises, deleveraging episodes, government debt overhang, and the zero‐lower‐bound.     

Corruption,regulation, and growth: an empirical study of the United States

This paper investigates whether the costs of corruption are conditional on the extent of government intervention in the economy. We use data on corruption convictions and economic growth between 1975 and 2007 across the US states to test this hypothesis. Although no state approaches the level of government intervention found in many developing countries, we still find evidence for the “weak” form of the grease-the-wheels hypothesis. While corruption is never good for growth, its harmful effects are smaller in states with more regulation.     

Nonlinear effects of government spending shocks in the USA: Evidence from state‐level data

This paper uses state‐level data to estimate the effect of government spending shocks during expansions and recessions. By employing a mixed‐frequency framework, we are able to include a long span of annual state‐level government spending data in our nonlinear quarterly panel VAR model. We find evidence that for the average state the fiscal multiplier is larger during recessions. However, there is substantial heterogeneity across the cross‐section. The degree of nonlinearity in the effect of spending shocks is larger in states that are subject to a higher degree of financial frictions. In contrast, states with a prevalence of manufacturing, mining and agricultural industries tend to have multipliers that are more similar across business cycle phases.     

Enhancing economic freedom via school choice and competition: Have state laws been enabling enough to generate broad-based effects?

An aspect of economic freedom that varies across U.S. states is K-12 educational freedom. Some states allow a degree of choice for families in selecting schools outside public schools for their children. However, the enabling laws for such programs are often quite restrictive and limited to few children. Can this limited degree of competition and choice have a noticeable effect on an entire state's overall K-12 performance? I find strikingly large test score gains for states that have adopted voucher programs and/or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), swamping the effect of per pupil K-12 spending on test scores. Moreover, vouchers and ESAs are associated with less per pupil spending. These effects are robust to a host of specification checks. A key factor is the amount of a program's funding that “follows the student,” even if a small number of students are eligible. Overall, it seems that even a small measure of educational freedom has a large effect.     

State and local fiscal policy and growth at the border

The paper studies the connection between state and local fiscal policy, as measured by the share of government spending and revenues in personal income, and the economic activity of counties that share a state border. I construct a panel of pairs of US counties that share a state border from the 1970s to 2012. Economic activity is measured by county employment, wages and business establishments. The state and local government spending and revenue shares are aggregates for the states on the respective sides of the border. I estimate distributed lag regressions of changes in economic activity on changes in state and local government budgets in two ways. The first (double difference) utilizes change in the difference between border counties. This suggests a quite modest relocation of economic activity away from states with fiscal expansion. I then look at activity on each side of the border separately and find more substantial and consistently negative effects of fiscal expansion on both sides of the border. A border county shares the negative consequences for its neighbor of growth in the size of that neighbor's state and local governments. This negative fiscal externality is roughly half the size of the direct negative effects from similar own-state spending increases, and the sum of the two is substantial economically.     

Dynamics of fiscal financing in the United States

General equilibrium models that include policy rules for government spending, lump-sum transfers, and distortionary taxation on labor and capital income and on consumption expenditures are fit to US data under rich specifications of fiscal policy rules to obtain several results. First, the best-fitting model allows many fiscal instruments to respond to debt. Second, responses of aggregates to fiscal policy shocks under rich rules vary considerably from responses where only non-distortionary fiscal instruments finance debt. Third, in the short run, all fiscal instruments except labor taxes react strongly to debt, but long-run intertemporal financing comes from all components of the government’s budget constraint. Fourth, debt-financed fiscal shocks trigger long-lasting dynamics; short-run and long-run multipliers can differ markedly.     

Measures of corruption and determinants of US corruption

This paper contributes to the literature by examining whether conclusions from empirical models of corruption determinants are robust with respect to three alternative measures of corrupt activity for the US states. Are the determinants of US corruption sensitive to the choice of the measure of corruption? Overall, the answer to this question is that the choice of the measure of corruption matters in explaining corruption. However, some findings are robust across measures. For instance, greater educational attainment lowers corruption, while greater judicial employment adds to corruption. Southern states were found to be more corrupt, ceteris paribus. We also provide evidence that it is important to control for enforcement efforts in empirical modeling using convictions as a measure of corruption. Significant differences, however, across corruption measures occur in a number of other instances. Specifically, the effects of urbanization, economic prosperity, population size, media, government spending, and enforcement are sensitive to the measure of corruption. Further, the influences of the nation’s foreign neighbors and of the location of the state relative to the nation’s capital remain unclear.     

The trouble with naïve Keynesianism

Since the Keynesian Revolution of the 1930s, many prominent economists have argued that a useful policy response to economic depression is to boost government spending. But pressure to spend quickly increases the potential for waste and inefficiency: this is ignored or dismissed in the Keynesian literature. For example, a widely cited cost–benefit analysis of stimulus spending does not even acknowledge the possibility of waste, and some Keynesians go so far as to argue that wasteful spending during a crisis can nonetheless be desirable. Here we extend the typical analysis by accounting explicitly for the leading sources of cost including waste, resource costs, and the excess burden of taxation. Our results suggest that stimulus spending that is largely wasteful is unlikely to generate net wealth. A proper response to economic depression must consider the possibility that government waste can render stimulus spending counterproductive.     

Social expenditure cyclicality: New time-varying evidence in developing economies

This paper provides a novel dataset of time-varying measures of cyclicality in social spending for an unbalanced panel of forty-five developing economies from 1982 to 2012. We focus on four categories of government social expenditure: health, social protection, pensions, and education. We find that in developing countries social spending has been acyclical over time, with the exception of spending on pensions. However, sample averages hide marked heterogeneity across countries, with many individually showing procyclical behavior in different social spending categories. The use of time-varying measures of social spending cyclicality overcomes the major limitation of previous studies in assessing the drivers of fiscal cyclicality that rely solely on cross-country regressions and, therefore, cannot account for country-specific as well as global factors. Using weighted least squares regressions, we find that the degree of social spending (pro)cyclicality is negatively associated with financial deepening, the level of economic development, trade openness, government size, and political constraints on the executive.     

Remittances and economic growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin American-Caribbean countries: a panel unit root and panel cointegration analysis

This study estimates the macroeconomic impact of remittances and some control variables such as openness of the economy, capital/labor ratio, and economic freedom on the economic growth of African, Asian, and Latin American-Caribbean countries using newly developed panel unit-root tests, cointegration tests, and Panel Fully Modified OLS (PFMOLS). We use annual panel data from 1985–2007for 64 countries consisting of 29 from Africa, 14 from Asia, and 21 from Latin America and the Caribbean region, respectively. We find that remittances, openness of the economy, and capital labor ratio have positive and significant effect on economic growth for all regions as a group and in each of the three in study. While the economic freedom index also has a positive and significant effect on growth in Africa and Latin America, however, its effect on the economic growth of Asia is mixed.     

Looking across borders: A test of spatial policy interdependence using local government efficiency ratings

Spatial patterns in (local) government taxation and spending decisions have received a lot of attention. Still, the focus on taxation or expenditure levels in previous studies may be incomplete. Indeed, (rational) individuals are likely to consider the level of spending on (or taxation for) public goods provision simultaneously with how much public goods they actually receive—thus assessing the ‘price/quantity’ of government policies. Therefore, the present paper argues that incumbents may want their ‘price/quantity’ ratio to be close to that in neighbouring regions. Analysing Flemish local governments' efficiency ratings for the year 2000 (which relate total spending to the quantity of locally provided public goods), we confirm the existence of neighbourhood effects in local government policies.     

Looking across borders: A test of spatial policy interdependence using local government efficiency ratings

Spatial patterns in (local) government taxation and spending decisions have received a lot of attention. Still, the focus on taxation or expenditure levels in previous studies may be incomplete. Indeed, (rational) individuals are likely to consider the level of spending on (or taxation for) public goods provision simultaneously with how much public goods they actually receive—thus assessing the ‘price/quantity’ of government policies. Therefore, the present paper argues that incumbents may want their ‘price/quantity’ ratio to be close to that in neighbouring regions. Analysing Flemish local governments' efficiency ratings for the year 2000 (which relate total spending to the quantity of locally provided public goods), we confirm the existence of neighbourhood effects in local government policies.     

State productivity growth in agriculture: catching-up and the business cycle

This paper examines the relation between the business cycle and convergence in levels of agricultural productivity across the 48 contiguous states. First, we find evidence of convergence in total factor productivity levels across the different phases of the business cycle, but the speed of convergence was greater during periods of contraction in economic activity than during periods of expansion. Second, we find that technology embodied in capital was an important source of productivity growth in agriculture. As with the rate of catch-up, the embodiment effect was much stronger during low economic activity phases of the business cycle.     

What are the effects of fiscal policy shocks?

We propose and apply a new approach for analyzing the effects of fiscal policy using vector autoregressions. Specifically, we use sign restrictions to identify a government revenue shock as well as a government spending shock, while controlling for a generic business cycle shock and a monetary policy shock. We explicitly allow for the possibility of announcement effects, i.e., that a current fiscal policy shock changes fiscal policy variables in the future, but not at present. We construct the impulse responses to three linear combinations of these fiscal shocks, corresponding to the three scenarios of deficit‐spending, deficit‐financed tax cuts and a balanced budget spending expansion. We apply the method to US quarterly data from 1955 to 2000. We find that deficit‐financed tax cuts work best among these three scenarios to improve GDP, with a maximal present value multiplier of five dollars of total additional GDP per each dollar of the total cut in government revenue 5 years after the shock. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

地区间生产率差异与收敛——基于中国各产业的分析

本文主要分析了中国各产业的省际间劳动生产率差异与收敛问题.实证结果表明,改革开放以来,中国各产业地区间劳动生产率存在明显的差异.从20世纪90年代开始,产业间生产率差异随时间呈现出扩大趋势.各产业不存在地区间劳动生产率的绝对收敛,却存在条件收敛,而且收敛的速度较快.实证也发现,各产业地区间的劳动生产率差异是地区间人均收入差异的直接原因,各产业地区间生产率差异和经济增长的快慢统计上并没有必然的联系.     

How economic integration affects the vertical structure of the public sector

This paper investigates the impact of economic integration on the vertical structure of the public sector within a country. To tackle this issue we set up a model of fiscal federalism, where economic integration is assumed to affect central government tax revenues. The main findings are that when an increase of the impact of economic integration brings about a reduction in central government tax revenues, under certain conditions: (a) it reduces central government expenditure; (b) it reduces general government expenditure; (c) it increases local taxation; (d) it increases the degree of public sector decentralization. Quite interestingly, these results are consistent with different patterns of local public spending and grants to local government.     

我国财政支出政策冲击效应的动态变化——基于包含随机波动的时变参数模型的考察

本文采用能够同时捕捉区制转换性变化和累积性变化的包含随机波动的时变参数结构向量自回归模型实证考察了1995~2009年间我国政府支出冲击效应的动态变化。结果表明虽然财政支出冲击的传导机制出现了局部的趋势性变化,但是对冲击效应的影响并不显著;冲击效应的大小主要取决于冲击本身的波动性。冲击的波动越大,冲击效应水平越高。这也使得冲击效应的动态变化在样本期间上表现出明显的区制转换性特征。