Riassunto analitico
I identify government spending “news" and “surprise" shocks for the US economy by using data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. News or “foresight" shocks capture the effects of announcements of future government spending expansions or contractions, as revealed by the innovations of professional forecasts. By contrast, surprise shocks are unanticipated changes of current spending and are conceptually identical to the standard government shocks of Blanchard and Perotti (2002). I find that surprise shocks have essentially no effect on economic activity (but for the impact effect), whereas news shocks have important effects on GDP in the short and medium run. The fiscal multiplier of news shocks is much larger than 1 at short-and medium-run horizons, in line with the Keynesian view.
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