The Optimal Use of Government Purchases for Macroeconomic Stabilization

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pascal Michaillat ◽  
Emmanuel Saez
2003 ◽  
pp. 68-80
Author(s):  
A. Dementiev ◽  
A. Zolotareva ◽  
A. Reus

The most important measures stimulating the increase of efficiency and effectiveness of budget expenditures on road construction are the improvement of pricing mechanisms and increasing efficiency of the procedures of government purchases of goods, works and services. The paper includes the analysis of main problems that arise in the process of government purchases and construction pricing with the reference to budget expenditure on road construction. It includes the review and analysis of international experience and possible measures of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of government purchases and (road) construction pricing in Russia.


Author(s):  
Mihály Fazekas ◽  
Luciana Cingolani ◽  
Bence Tóth

While there is continued interest in measuring governance, disagreement on how best to do so has only grown over time. To provide pointers at innovative and rigorous indicator building, this chapter documents innovations in measuring a particularly challenging governance dimension: corruption in public procurement. In hopes of inspiring future research, the chapter critically reviews objective corruption proxies using administrative data on government purchases falling in four broad categories: tendering risk indicators, political connections indicators, supplier risk indicators, and contracting body risk indicators. The findings indicate that the best measurement instruments focus on the transaction level (micro level) while allowing for consistent aggregations for time series and cross-country comparisons. Such actionable indicators capture behaviour as directly as possible rather than remaining at the country level. They also retain the relational or transactional aspects of governance, revealing a much more dynamic picture than widely used population and expert surveys.


2005 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan J Auerbach ◽  
Maurice Obstfeld

Prevalent thinking about liquidity traps suggests that the perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate renders open-market operations ineffective for achieving macroeconomic stabilization goals. We show that even were this the case, there remains a powerful argument for large-scale open market operations as a fiscal policy tool. As we also demonstrate, however, this same reasoning implies that open-market operations will be beneficial for stabilization as well, even when the economy is expected to remain mired in a liquidity trap for some time. Thus, the microeconomic fiscal benefits of open-market operations in a liquidity trap go hand in hand with standard macroeconomic objectives. Motivated by Japan’s recent economic experience, we use a dynamic general-equilibrium model to assess the welfare impact of open-market operations for an economy in Japan’s predicament. We argue Japan can achieve a substantial welfare improvement through large open-market purchases of domestic government debt.


2012 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Kollmann ◽  
Werner Roeger ◽  
Jan in't Veld

A key dimension of fiscal policy during the financial crisis was massive government support for the banking system. The macroeconomic effects of that support have, so far, received little attention in the literature. This paper fills this gap, using a quantitative dynamic model with a banking sector. Our results suggest that state aid for banks may have a strong positive effect on real activity. Bank state aid multipliers are in the same range as conventional fiscal spending multipliers. Support for banks has a positive effect on investment, while a rise in government purchases crowds out investment.


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