Policy Variability in Models of Endogenous Growth with Productive Spending

Existing theoretical analyses have shown that if policy variables affect investmentdecisions in either physical or human capital then an increase in policy variability results in higher trend output growth as individuals respond to higher uncertainty with a precautionary increase in these types of investment. In this paper I present two models in which policy variability arises from randomness in the provision of productive spending. In the first model, public spending enters as an input in the production technology of the economy. In this case I find that the sign of the policy variability-growth relationship depends critically on the technological parameters of the production function. In the second model, public spending is an input on the education sector of the economy. In this case I find that policy variability is always growth retarding as individuals respond to increased uncertainty by actually reducing rather than increasing their investment in human capital.