Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T01:32:44.977Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

GOVERNMENT SPENDING MULTIPLIERS IN GOOD TIMES AND BAD TIMES: THE CASE OF EMERGING MARKETS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2020

Fábio Augusto Reis Gomes
Affiliation:
University of São Paulo – FEARP/USP
Sergio Naruhiko Sakurai
Affiliation:
University of São Paulo – FEARP/USP
Gian Paulo Soave*
Affiliation:
Federal University of Bahia – UFBA
*
Address correspondence to: Gian Paulo Soave, Department of Economics, Federal University of Bahia - UFBA, Praça da Piedade, no. 06, Salvador, BA40060-300, Brazil. email: [email protected].

Abstract

We investigate the presence of nonlinear effects of government spending shocks during good and bad times in a panel of 17 emerging markets through the lens of a Bayesian panel threshold VAR model. We find that the responses of gross domestic product, consumption, investment, trade balance, real exchange rate, and real interest rates vary depending on the state of the economy. Particularly, in slump periods, both consumption and investment may respond negatively to a government purchase stimulus, unlike in normal times. Our estimated government spending multipliers are less than one in the two regimes and can be zero in bad times.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The authors would like to thank the associate editor and anonymous referee for helpful suggestions and constructive comments. Fábio Augusto Reis Gomes acknowledges financial support from the CNPq— Brazil.

References

REFERENCES

Abo-Zaid, S. (2020) The government spending multiplier in a model with the cost channel. Macroeconomic Dynamics, 130. doi: 10.1017/S1365100520000061.Google Scholar
Akinci, O. (2013) Global financial conditions, country spreads and macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging countries. Journal of International Economics 91(2), 358371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Auerbach, A. J. and Gorodnichenko, Y. (2012a) Fiscal Multipliers in Recession and Expansion, pp. 6398. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Auerbach, A. J. and Gorodnichenko, Y. (2012b) Measuring the output responses to fiscal policy. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 4(2), 127.Google Scholar
Auerbach, A. J. and Gorodnichenko, Y. (2013) Output spillovers from fiscal policy. American Economic Review 103(3), 141146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Auerbach, A. J. and Gorodnichenko, Y. (2017) Fiscal Stimulus and Fiscal Sustainability. Working Paper: No. 23789, National Bureau of Economic Research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bahaj, S. (2019) Sovereign spreads in the euro area: Cross border transmission and macroeconomic implications. Journal of Monetary Economics 110, 116135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, S. R., Bloom, N. and Davis, S. J. (2016) Measuring economic policy uncertainty*. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 131(4), 15931636.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balakrishnan, R., Danninger, S., Elekdag, S. and Tytell, I. (2011) The transmission of financial stress from advanced to emerging economies. Emerging Markets Finance and Trade 47, 4068.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bańbura, M., Giannone, D. and Reichlin, L. (2010) Large Bayesian vector auto regressions. Journal of Applied Econometrics 25(1), 7192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanchard, O. and Perotti, R. (2002) An empirical characterization of the dynamic effects of changes in government spending and taxes on output. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 117(4), 13291368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanchard, O. J. (1990) [Can severe fiscal contractions be expansionary? Tales of two small European countries]: Comment. NBER Macroeconomics Annual 5, 111116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloom, N. (2009) The impact of uncertainty shocks. Econometrica 77(3), 623685.Google Scholar
Caggiano, G., Castelnuovo, E., Colombo, V. and Nodari, G. (2015) Estimating fiscal multipliers: News from a non-linear world. The Economic Journal 125(584), 746776.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caldara, D. and Kamps, C. (2017) The analytics of SVARs: A unified framework to measure fiscal multipliers. The Review of Economic Studies 84(3), 10151040.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calvo, G. a., A. Izquierdo and E. Talvi (2006) Phoenix Miracles in Emerging Markets: Recovering Without Credit From Systemic Financial Crises. NBER Working Paper Series, 12101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carriere-Swallow, Y., David, A. and Leigh, D. (2018) The Macroeconomic Effects of Fiscal Consolidation in Emerging Economies: Evidence from Latin America. Working Paper: 18/142, International Monetary Fund.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carriero, A., Clark, T. E. and Marcellino, M. (2018) Endogenous Uncertainty. Working Paper: No. 18-05, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carter, C. K. and Kohn, R. (1994) On Gibbs sampling for state space models. Biometrika 81(3), 541553.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, C. W. S. and Lee, J. C. (1995) Bayesian inference of threshold autoregressive models. Journal of Time Series Analysis 16(5), 483492.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chian Koh, W. (2017) Fiscal multipliers: New evidence from a large panel of countries. Oxford Economic Papers 69(3), 569590.Google Scholar
Corsetti, G., Kuester, K., Meier, A. and Müller, G. J. (2013) Sovereign risk, fiscal policy, and macroeconomic stability. The Economic Journal 123(566), F99F132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corsetti, G., Meier, A. and Müller, G. J. (2012) What Determines Government Spending Multipliers? IMF Working Paper, WP/12/150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, G. W. and Honkapohja, S. (2007) Policy interaction, learning, and the fiscal theory of prices. Macroeconomic Dynamics 11(5), 665690.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fazzari, S. M., Morley, J. and Panovska, I. (2015) State-dependent effects of fiscal policy. Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics 19(3), 285315.Google Scholar
Ferraresi, T., Roventini, A. and Fagiolo, G. (2015) Fiscal policies and credit regimes: A TVAR approach. Journal of Applied Econometrics 30(7), 10471072.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frankel, J. A., Végh, C. A. and Vuletin, G. (2013) On graduation from fiscal procyclicality. Journal of Development Economics 100(1), 3247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Furceri, D. and Li, B. G. (2017) The Macroeconomic (and Distributional) Effects of Public Investment in Developing Economies. Working Paper 17/2017, International Monetary Fund.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galí, J., López-Salido, J. D. and Vallés, J. (2007) Understanding the effects of government spending on consumption. Journal of the European Economic Association 5(1), 227270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gavin, M. and Perotti, R. (1997) Fiscal policy in Latin America. NBER Macroeconomics Annual 12, 1161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, A. (2006) Prior distributions for variance parameters in hierarchical models. Bayesian Analysis 1(3), 515534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giannone, D. and Reichlin, L. (2006) Does information help recovering structural shocks from past observations? Journal of the European Economic Association 4(2–3), 455465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, R. J. and Krenn, R. (2010) The End of the Great Depression 1939-41: Policy Contributions and Fiscal Multipliers. Working Paper 16380, National Bureau of Economic Research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huidrom, R., Kose, M. A., Lim, J. J. and Ohnsorge, F. L. (2019) Why do fiscal multipliers depend on fiscal positions? Journal of Monetary Economics. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2019.03.004.Google Scholar
Ilzetzki, E. (2011) Rent-seeking distortions and fiscal procyclicality. Journal of Development Economics 96(1), 3046.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ilzetzki, E., Mendoza, E. G. and Végh, C. A. (2013) How big (small?) are fiscal multipliers? Journal of Monetary Economics 60(2), 239254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jarociński, M. (2010) Responses to monetary policy shocks in the east and the west of Europe: A comparison. Journal of Applied Econometrics 25(5), 833868.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koop, G., Pesaran, M. and Potter, S. M. (1996) Impulse response analysis in nonlinear multivariate models. Journal of Econometrics 74(1), 119147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kraay, A. (2014) Government spending multipliers in developing countries: Evidence from lending by official creditors. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 6(4), 170208.Google Scholar
Leeper, E. M., Walker, T. B. and Yang, S.-C. S. (2013) Fiscal foresight and information flows. Econometrica 81(3), 11151145.Google Scholar
Mankiw, N. G. (2000) The Savers-Spenders Theory of Fiscal Policy. Working Paper: No. 7571, National Bureau of Economic Research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miyamoto, W., Nguyen, T. L. and Sheremirov, V. (2019) The effects of government spending on real exchange rates: Evidence from military spending panel data. Journal of International Economics 116, 144157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monacelli, T. and Perotti, R. (2010) Fiscal policy, the real exchange rate and traded goods. The Economic Journal 120(544), 437461.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mountford, A. and Uhlig, H. (2009) What are the effects of fiscal policy shocks? Journal of Applied Econometrics 24(6), 960992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumtaz, H., Pirzada, A. and Theodoridis, K. (2018) Non-linear Effects of Oil Shocks on Stock Prices. Working Papers, Queen Mary University of London, 865.Google Scholar
Mumtaz, H. and Sunder-Plassmann, L. (2017) Non-linear Effects of Government Spending Shocks in the US. Evidence from State-Level Data. Working Papers, Queen Mary University of London, 841.Google Scholar
Neumeyer, P. A. and Perri, F. (2005) Business cycles in emerging economies: The role of interest rates. Journal of Monetary Economics 52(2), 345380.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ngo, P. V. (2019) Fiscal multipliers at the zero lower bound: The role of government spending persistence. Macroeconomic Dynamics, 128. doi: 10.1017/S136510051900049X.Google Scholar
Owyang, M. T., Ramey, V. A. and Zubairy, S. (2013) Are government spending multipliers greater during periods of slack? Evidence from twentieth-century historical data. American Economic Review 103(3), 129134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quaghebeur, E. (2019) Learning and the size of the government spending multiplier. Macroeconomic Dynamics 23(8), 31893224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramey, V. A. (2019) Ten years after the financial crisis: What have we learned from the renaissance in fiscal research? The Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(2), 89114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramey, V. A. and Zubairy, S. (2018) Government spending multipliers in good times and in bad: Evidence from US historical data. Journal of Political Economy 126(2), 850901.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravn, M. O., Schmitt-Grohé, S. and Uribe, M. (2012) Consumption, government spending, and the real exchange rate. Journal of Monetary Economics 59(3), 215234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruisi, G. (2018). Uncertainty and Monetary Policy Effectiveness across Euro Area Countries: A Threshold Hierarchical Panel VAR. Working Papers, Queen Mary University of London.Google Scholar
Schmitt-Grohé, S. and Uribe, M. (2016) Downward nominal wage rigidity, currency pegs, and involuntary unemployment. Journal of Political Economy 124(5), 14661514.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soave, G. P. (2020) Financial conditions and the business cycles in emerging markets. Applied Economics Letters, 17.Google Scholar
Talvi, E. and Végh, C. A. (2005) Tax base variability and procyclical fiscal policy in developing countries. Journal of Development Economics 78(1), 156190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uribe, M. and Schmitt-Grohé, S. (2017) Open Economy Macroeconomics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Uribe, M. and Yue, V. Z. (2006) Country spreads and emerging countries: Who drives whom? Journal of International Economics 69(1), 636.CrossRefGoogle Scholar