IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecpoli/v23y2008i56p716-756..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Social spending and automatic stabilizers in the OECD
[‘Real-time output gaps in ex post policy analysis: A red herring?’]

Author

Listed:
  • Julia Darby
  • Jacques Melitz

Abstract

The macroeconomic literature on automatic stabilization tends to focus on taxes and dismiss the relevance of government expenditure except for unemployment compensation. Our results go sharply contrary to this view. We engage in an empirical analysis of 21 OECD countries from 1982 to 2003 and find that age- and health-related social expenditure as well as incapacity and sick benefits all react to the cycle in a stabilizing manner. While possibly new in the macro literature, this conforms to many results in studies in labour economics. The policy implications are broad since much previous analysis of discretionary fiscal policy rests on official figures for automatic stabilization. There are also major implications for efforts to incorporate automatic fiscal policy in simulation models.— Julia Darby and Jacques Melitz

Suggested Citation

  • Julia Darby & Jacques Melitz, 2008. "Social spending and automatic stabilizers in the OECD [‘Real-time output gaps in ex post policy analysis: A red herring?’]," Economic Policy, CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po;CES;MSH, vol. 23(56), pages 716-756.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecpoli:v:23:y:2008:i:56:p:716-756.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1468-0327.2008.00210.x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ecpoli:v:23:y:2008:i:56:p:716-756.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cebruuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.