IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/cbscwp/32.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Behavior of U.S. Deficits

Author

Listed:
  • Barro, Robert J.

Abstract

The tax-smoothing theory suggests that deficits would respond particularly to recession, temporarily high government spending, and anticipated inflation. My empirical estimates indicate that a relation of this type is reasonably stable in the U.S. since at least 1920. In particular, the statistical evidence does not support the idea that there has been a shift toward a fiscal policy that generates either more real public debt on average or that generates larger deficits in response to recessions. Further, the deficits for 1982-83 and projections for 1984 are consistent with the previous structure. The high values of these deficits reflect the customary response to substantial recession (interacting with big government) and to expected inflation.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Barro, Robert J., 1984. "The Behavior of U.S. Deficits," Working Papers 32, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:cbscwp:32
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/262434/1/wp032.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Butkiewicz, James L., 1983. "The market value of outstanding government debt : Comment," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 373-379.
    2. Barro, Robert J, 1979. "On the Determination of the Public Debt," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 87(5), pages 940-971, October.
    3. Lucas, Robert Jr. & Stokey, Nancy L., 1983. "Optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 55-93.
    4. Finn Kydland & Edward C. Prescott, 1980. "A Competitive Theory of Fluctuations and the Feasibility and Desirability of Stabilization Policy," NBER Chapters, in: Rational Expectations and Economic Policy, pages 169-198, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Huizinga, John & Mishkin, Frederic S., 1986. "Monetary policy regime shifts and the unusual behavior of real interest rates," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 24(1), pages 231-274, January.
    2. Skinner, Jonathan, 1988. "The welfare cost of uncertain tax policy," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 129-145, November.
    3. repec:ebl:ecbull:v:5:y:2007:i:14:p:1-9 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. John A. Tatom, 1984. "A perspective on the federal deficit problem," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 66(Jun), pages 5-17.
    5. Sahar Bahmani, 2007. "Do budget deficits follow a linear or non-linear path?," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 5(14), pages 1-9.
    6. Ricci-Risquete, Alejandro & Ramajo, Julián & de Castro, Francisco, 2016. "Do Spanish fiscal regimes follow the euro-area trends? Evidence from Markov-Switching fiscal rules," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 484-494.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Barro, Robert J., 1987. "Government spending, interest rates, prices, and budget deficits in the United Kingdom, 1701-1918," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(2), pages 221-247, September.
    2. Dole, C. A., 2000. "Optimal Taxation and the Stationarity of State Tax Rates," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 22(3), pages 515-531, July.
    3. Maria Cornachione Kula, 2004. "U.S. States, the Medicaid Program, and Tax Smoothing," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 70(3), pages 490-511, January.
    4. Marcet, Albert & Scott, Andrew, 2009. "Debt and deficit fluctuations and the structure of bond markets," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(2), pages 473-501, March.
    5. Huang, Chao-Hsi & Lin, Kenneth S., 1993. "Deficits, government expenditures, and tax smoothing in the United States: 1929-1988," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 317-339, June.
    6. Michael D. Bordo & Finn E. Kydland, 1990. "The Gold Standard as a Rule," NBER Working Papers 3367, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Torben M. Andersen & Robert R. Dogonowski, 2004. "What Should Optimal Income Taxes Smooth?," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 6(3), pages 491-507, August.
    8. Maria Cornachione Kula, 2004. "U.S. States, the Medicaid Program, and Tax Smoothing," Southern Economic Journal, Southern Economic Association, vol. 70(3), pages 490-511, January.
    9. Maria Comachione Kula, 2004. "U.S. States, the Medicaid Program, and Tax Smoothing," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 70(3), pages 490-511, January.
    10. Ananda Jayawickrama & Tilak Abeysinghe, 2013. "The experience of some OECD economies on tax smoothing," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(16), pages 2305-2313, June.
    11. Robert J. Barro, 1986. "The Behavior of United States Deficits," NBER Chapters, in: The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change, pages 361-394, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. George-Marios Angeletos & Alessandro Pavan, 2009. "Policy with Dispersed Information," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 7(1), pages 11-60, March.
    13. Martin, Fernando M., 2015. "Debt, inflation and central bank independence," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 129-150.
    14. Elmendorf, Douglas W. & Gregory Mankiw, N., 1999. "Government debt," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 25, pages 1615-1669, Elsevier.
    15. N. Gregory Mankiw & Ricardo Reis, 2002. "Sticky Information versus Sticky Prices: A Proposal to Replace the New Keynesian Phillips Curve," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(4), pages 1295-1328.
    16. Christopher Sleet, 2004. "Optimal Taxation with Private Government Information," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 71(4), pages 1217-1239.
    17. Campbell Leith & Simon Wren-Lewis, 2013. "Fiscal Sustainability in a New Keynesian Model," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 45(8), pages 1477-1516, December.
    18. Stéphane Guibaud & Yves Nosbusch & Dimitri Vayanos, 2013. "Bond Market Clienteles, the Yield Curve, and the Optimal Maturity Structure of Government Debt," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 26(8), pages 1914-1961.
    19. Yoosoon Chang & Yongok Choi & Chang Sik Kim & J. Isaac Miller & Joon Y. Park, 2024. "Common Trends and Country Specific Heterogeneities in Long-Run World Energy Consumption," Working Papers No 01/2024, Centre for Applied Macro- and Petroleum economics (CAMP), BI Norwegian Business School.
    20. Ryo Arawatari & Tetsuo Ono, 2015. "Redistributive Politics And Government Debt In A Borrowing-Constrained Economy," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 67(1), pages 83-103, January.

    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:zbw:cbscwp:32. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsuchus.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.