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HOW CAN THE GOVERNMENT SPENDING MULTIPLIER BE SMALL AT THE ZERO LOWER BOUND?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2018

Valerio Ercolani  and
João Valle e Azevedo
Valerio Ercolani
Affiliation:
Bank of Italy
João Valle e Azevedo*
Affiliation:
Bank of Portugal and Nova School of Business and Economics
*
Address correspondence to: João Valle e Azevedo, Bank of Portugal, Av. Almirante Reis 71, 6th Floor, 1150-012 Lisbon, Portugal. e-mail: azevedojv@gmail.com
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Abstract

Some recent empirical evidence questions the typically large size of government spending multipliers when the nominal interest rate is stuck at zero, finding output multipliers of around 1 or even lower, with an upper bound of around 1.5 in some circumstances. In this paper, we use a recent estimate of the degree of substitutability between private and government consumption in an otherwise standard New Keynesian model to show that this channel significantly reduces the size of government spending multipliers obtained when the nominal interest rate is at zero. All else being equal, the relationship of substitutability makes a government spending shock crowd out private consumption while being less inflationary, thus, limiting the typically expansionary effect of the fall in the real interest rate. Subject to the nominal interest rate being constrained at zero, the model generates output multipliers ranging from 0.8 to 1.6.

Keywords

Nonseparable Government ConsumptionSubstitutabilityZero Lower BoundFiscal Multipliers
Type
Notes
Information
Macroeconomic Dynamics , Volume 23 , Issue 8 , December 2019 , pp. 3457 - 3482
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

The authors are grateful to Pedro Amaral, Rolando Bianchi, Ettore Panetti, and Pedro Teles for useful comments and suggestions. All errors are ours. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of Bank of Italy, Bank of Portugal, or the Eurosystem. Part of the work of Valerio Ercolani was carried out while he was working at Bank of Portugal.

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