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Investigating government spending multiplier for the US economy: empirical evidence using a triple lasso approach

Author

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  • Zacharias Bragoudakis

    (Bank of Greece and National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)

  • Dimitrios Panas

    (Tilburg University and Systemic RM)

Abstract

An essential dilemma in economics that has yielded ambiguous answers is whether governments should spend more in recessions. This paper provides an extension of the work of Ramey & Zubairy (2018) for the US economy according to which the government spending multipliers are below unity, especially when the economy experiences severe slack. Nonetheless, their work suffered from some limitations with respect to invertibility and weak instrument problem. The contribution of this paper is twofold: Firstly, it provides evidence that a triple lasso approach for the lag selection is a useful tool in removing the invertibility issues and the weak instrument problem. Secondly, the main results using a triple lasso approach suggest multipliers below unity for most cases with no evidence for differences between different states of the economy. Nevertheless, re-running the code in Ramey & Zubairy (2018), the case where WWII is excluded exhibits multipliers above unity, in both the military news and Blanchard-Perotti specifications, contradicting their baseline findings and providing evidence for a more effective government spending in recessions.

Suggested Citation

  • Zacharias Bragoudakis & Dimitrios Panas, 2021. "Investigating government spending multiplier for the US economy: empirical evidence using a triple lasso approach," Working Papers 292, Bank of Greece.
    • Handle: RePEc:bog:wpaper:292
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    government spending; fiscal multipliers; debiased machine learning; triple lasso;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C52 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Evaluation, Validation, and Selection
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy; Modern Monetary Theory
    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General
    • N42 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - U.S.; Canada: 1913-

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