Why does private consumption rise after a government spending shock?

Abstract.  Some recent empirical evidence suggests that private consumption is crowded-in by government spending. This outcome violates neoclassical macroeconomic theory, according to which the negative wealth effect brought about by a rise in public expenditure should decrease consumption. In this paper, we develop a simple real business cycle model where preferences depend on private and public spending, and households are habit forming. The model is estimated by the maximum-likelihood method using U.S. data. Estimation results indicate a strong Edgeworth complementarity between private and public spending. This feature enables the model to generate a positive response of consumption following a government spending shock. In addition, the impulse-response functions generated by the estimated model are generally consistent with those obtained from a benchmark vector autoregression.     

Has exchange rate pass-through really declined? Evidence from Canada

Several empirical studies suggest that exchange rate pass-through has declined in recent years among industrialized countries. Results for Canada also indicate that import and consumer prices have become less responsive to exchange-rate movements in the 1990s. These findings are based on reduced-form regressions that are typically motivated by partial-equilibrium models of pricing. This paper uses instead a structural, general-equilibrium approach to test the premise that exchange rate pass-through has decreased in Canada. Our approach consists in estimating a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model for Canada over two sub-samples, which cover the periods before and after the adoption of inflation targeting by the Bank of Canada. We then use impulse-response analysis to assess the stability of exchange rate pass-through across the two sub-samples. Our results indicate that pass-through to Canadian import prices has been rather stable, while pass-through to Canadian consumer prices has declined in recent years. Counterfactual experiments reveal that the change in monetary policy regime is largely responsible for this decline.