The active use of macroeconomic policies to smooth economic fluctuations and, as a consequence, the stance that policymakers should adopt over the business cycle, remain controversial issues in the economic literature. In the light of the dramatic experience of the early 1930s’ Great Depression, Keynes (1936) argued that the market mechanism could not be relied upon to spontaneously recover from a slump, and advocated counter-cyclical public spending and monetary policy to stimulate demand. Albeit the Keynesian doctrine had largely influenced policymaking during the two decades following World War II, it began to be seriously challenged in several directions since the start of the 1970s. The introduction of rational expectations within macroeconomic models implied that aggregate demand management could not stabilize the economy’s responses to shocks (see in particular Sargent and Wallace (1975)). According to this view, in fact, rational agents foresee the effects of the implemented policies, and wage and price expectations are revised upwards accordingly. Therefore, real wages and money balances remain constant and so does output. Within such a conceptual framework, only unexpected policy interventions would have some short-run effects upon the economy. The "real business cycle (RBC) theory", pioneered by Kydland and Prescott (1982), offered an alternative explanation on the nature of fluctuations in economic activity, viewed as reflecting the efficient responses of optimizing agents to exogenous sources of fluctuations, outside the direct control of policymakers. The normative implication was that there should be no role for economic policy activism: fiscal and monetary policy should be acyclical. The latest generation of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models builds on rigorous foundations in intertemporal optimizing behavior by consumers and firms inherited from the RBC literature, but incorporates some frictions in the adjustment of nominal and real quantities in response to macroeconomic shocks (see Woodford (2003)). In such a framework, not only policy "surprises" may have an impact on the economic activity, but also the way policymakers "systematically" respond to exogenous sources of fluctuation plays a fundamental role in affecting the economic activity, thereby rekindling interest in the use of counter-cyclical stabilization policies to fine tune the business cycle. Yet, despite impressive advances in the economic theory and econometric techniques, there are no definitive answers on the systematic stance policymakers should follow, and on the effects of macroeconomic policies upon the economy. Against this background, the present thesis attempts to inspect the interrelations between macroeconomic policies and the economic activity from novel angles. Three contributions are proposed. In the first Chapter, I show that relying on the information actually available to policymakers when budgetary decisions are taken is of fundamental importance for the assessment of the cyclical stance of governments. In the second, I explore whether the effectiveness of fiscal shocks in spurring the economic activity has declined since the beginning of the 1970s. In the third, the impact of systematic monetary policies over U.S. industrial sectors is investigated. In the existing literature, empirical assessments of the historical stance of policymakers over the economic cycle have been mainly drawn from the estimation of "reduced-form" policy reaction functions (see in particular Taylor (1993) and Galì and Perotti (2003)). Such rules typically relate a policy instrument (a reference short-term interest rate or an indicator of discretionary fiscal policy) to a set of explanatory variables (notably inflation, the output gap and the debt-GDP ratio, as long as fiscal policy is concerned). Although these policy rules can be seen as simple approximations of what derived from an explicit optimization problem solved by social planners (see Kollmann (2007)), they received considerable attention since they proved to track the behavior of central banks and fiscal policymakers relatively well. Typically, revised data, i.e. observations available to the econometrician when the study is carried out, are used in the estimation of such policy reaction functions. However, data available in "real-time" to policymakers may end up to be remarkably different from what it is observed ex-post. Orphanides (2001), in an innovative and thought-provoking paper on the U.S. monetary policy, challenged the way policy evaluation was conducted that far by showing that unrealistic assumptions about the timeliness of data availability may yield misleading descriptions of historical policy. In the spirit of Orphanides (2001), in the first Chapter of this thesis I reconsider how the intentional cyclical stance of fiscal authorities should be assessed. Importantly, in the framework of fiscal policy rules, not only variables such as potential output and the output gap are subject to measurement errors, but also the main discretionary "operating instrument" in the hands of governments: the structural budget balance, i.e. the headline government balance net of the effects due to automatic stabilizers. In fact, the actual realization of planned fiscal measures may depend on several factors (such as the growth rate of GDP, the implementation lags that often follow the adoption of many policy measures, and others more) outside the direct and full control of fiscal authorities. Hence, there might be sizeable differences between discretionary fiscal measures as planned in the past and what it is observed ex-post. To be noted, this does not apply to monetary policy since central bankers can control their operating interest rates with great accuracy. When the historical behavior of fiscal authorities is analyzed from a real-time perspective, it emerges that the intentional stance has been counter-cyclical, especially during expansions, in the main OECD countries throughout the last thirteen years. This is at odds with findings based on revised data, generally pointing to pro-cyclicality (see for example Gavin and Perotti (1997)). It is shown that empirical correlations among revision errors and other second-order moments allow to predict the size and the sign of the bias incurred in estimating the intentional stance of the policy when revised data are (mistakenly) used. It addition, formal tests, based on a refinement of Hansen (1999), do not reject the hypothesis that the intentional reaction of fiscal policy to the cycle is characterized by two regimes: one counter-cyclical, when output is above its potential level, and the other acyclical, in the opposite case. On the contrary, the use of revised data does not allow to identify any threshold effect. The second and third Chapters of this thesis are devoted to the exploration of the impact of fiscal and monetary policies upon the economy. Over the last years, two approaches have been mainly followed by practitioners for the estimation of the effects of macroeconomic policies on the real activity. On the one hand, calibrated and estimated DSGE models allow to trace out the economy’s responses to policy disturbances within an analytical framework derived from solid microeconomic foundations. On the other, vector autoregressive (VAR) models continue to be largely used since they have proved to fit macro data particularly well, albeit they cannot fully serve to inspect structural interrelations among economic variables. Yet, the typical DSGE and VAR models are designed to handle a limited number of variables and are not suitable to address economic questions potentially involving a large amount of information. In a DSGE framework, in fact, identifying aggregate shocks and their propagation mechanism under a plausible set of theoretical restrictions becomes a thorny issue when many variables are considered. As for VARs, estimation problems may arise when models are specified in a large number of indicators (although latest contributions suggest that large-scale Bayesian VARs perform surprisingly well in forecasting. See in particular Banbura, Giannone and Reichlin (2007)). As a consequence, the growing popularity of factor models as effective econometric tools allowing to summarize in a parsimonious and flexible manner large amounts of information may be explained not only by their usefulness in deriving business cycle indicators and forecasting (see for example Reichlin (2002) and D’Agostino and Giannone (2006)), but also, due to recent developments, by their ability in evaluating the response of economic systems to identified structural shocks (see Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone, Lippi and Reichlin (2007)). Parallelly, some attempts have been made to combine the rigor of DSGE models and the tractability of VAR ones, with the advantages of factor analysis (see Boivin and Giannoni (2006) and Bernanke, Boivin and Eliasz (2005)). The second Chapter of this thesis, based on a joint work with Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, presents an original study combining factor and VAR analysis in an encompassing framework, to investigate how "unexpected" and "unsystematic" variations in taxes and government spending feed through the economy in the home country and abroad. The domestic impact of fiscal shocks in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. and cross-border fiscal spillovers from Germany to seven European economies is analyzed. In addition, the time evolution of domestic and cross-border tax and spending multipliers is explored. In fact, the way fiscal policy impacts on domestic and foreign economies depends on several factors, possibly changing over time. In particular, the presence of excess capacity, accommodating monetary policy, distortionary taxation and liquidity constrained consumers, plays a prominent role in affecting how fiscal policies stimulate the economic activity in the home country. The impact on foreign output crucially depends on the importance of trade links, on real exchange rates and, in a monetary union, on the sensitiveness of foreign economies to the common interest rate. It is well documented that the last thirty years have witnessed frequent changes in the economic environment. For instance, in most OECD countries, the monetary policy stance became less accommodating in the 1980s compared to the 1970s, and more accommodating again in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Moreover, financial markets have been heavily deregulated. Hence, fiscal policy might have lost (or gained) power as a stimulating tool in the hands of policymakers. Importantly, the issue of cross-border transmission of fiscal policy decisions is of the utmost relevance in the framework of the European Monetary Union and this explains why the debate on fiscal policy coordination has received so much attention since the adoption of the single currency (see Ahearne, Sapir and Véron (2006) and European Commission (2006)). It is found that over the period 1971 to 2004 tax shocks have generally been more effective in spurring domestic output than government spending shocks. Interestingly, the inclusion of common factors representing global economic phenomena yields to smaller multipliers reconciling, at least for the U.K., the evidence from large-scale macroeconomic models, generally finding feeble multipliers (see e.g. European Commission’s QUEST model), with the one from a prototypical structural VAR pointing to stronger effects of fiscal policy. When the estimation is performed recursively over samples of seventeen years of data, it emerges that GDP multipliers have dropped drastically from early 1990s on, especially in Germany (tax shocks) and in the U.S. (both tax and government spending shocks). Moreover, the conduct of fiscal policy seems to have become less erratic, as documented by a lower variance of fiscal shocks over time, and this might contribute to explain why business cycles have shown less volatility in the countries under examination. Expansionary fiscal policies in Germany do not generally have beggar-thy-neighbor effects on other European countries. In particular, our results suggest that tax multipliers have been positive but vanishing for neighboring countries (France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria), weak and mostly not significant for more remote ones (the U.K. and Spain). Cross-border government spending multipliers are found to be monotonically weak for all the subsamples considered. Overall these findings suggest that fiscal "surprises", in the form of unexpected reductions in taxation and expansions in government consumption and investment, have become progressively less successful in stimulating the economic activity at the domestic level, indicating that, in the framework of the European Monetary Union, policymakers can only marginally rely on this discretionary instrument as a substitute for national monetary policies. The objective of the third chapter is to inspect the role of monetary policy in the U.S. business cycle. In particular, the effects of "systematic" monetary policies upon several industrial sectors is investigated. The focus is on the systematic, or endogenous, component of monetary policy (i.e. the one which is related to the economic activity in a stable and predictable way), for three main reasons. First, endogenous monetary policies are likely to have sizeable real effects, if agents’ expectations are not perfectly rational and if there are some nominal and real frictions in a market. Second, as widely documented, the variability of the monetary instrument and of the main macro variables is only marginally explained by monetary "shocks", defined as unexpected and exogenous variations in monetary conditions. Third, monetary shocks can be simply interpreted as measurement errors (see Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (1998)). Hence, the systematic component of monetary policy is likely to have played a fundamental role in affecting business cycle fluctuations. The strategy to isolate the impact of systematic policies relies on a counterfactual experiment, within a (calibrated or estimated) macroeconomic model. As a first step, a macroeconomic shock to which monetary policy is likely to respond should be selected, and its effects upon the economy simulated. Then, the impact of such shock should be evaluated under a “policy-inactive” scenario, assuming that the central bank does not respond to it. Finally, by comparing the responses of the variables of interest under these two scenarios, some evidence on the sensitivity of the economic system to the endogenous component of the policy can be drawn (see Bernanke, Gertler and Watson (1997)). Such kind of exercise is first proposed within a stylized DSGE model, where the analytical solution of the model can be derived. However, as argued, large-scale multi-sector DSGE models can be solved only numerically, thus implying that the proposed experiment cannot be carried out. Moreover, the estimation of DSGE models becomes a thorny issue when many variables are incorporated (see Canova and Sala (2007)). For these arguments, a less “structural”, but more tractable, approach is followed, where a minimal amount of identifying restrictions is imposed. In particular, a factor model econometric approach is adopted (see in particular Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone, Lippi and Reichlin (2007)). In this framework, I develop a technique to perform the counterfactual experiment needed to assess the impact of systematic monetary policies. It is found that 2 and 3-digit SIC U.S. industries are characterized by very heterogeneous degrees of sensitivity to the endogenous component of the policy. Notably, the industries showing the strongest sensitivities are the ones producing durable goods and metallic materials. Non-durable good producers, food, textile and lumber producing industries are the least affected. In addition, it is highlighted that industrial sectors adjusting prices relatively infrequently are the most "vulnerable" ones. In fact, firms in this group are likely to increase quantities, rather than prices, following a shock positively hitting the economy. Finally, it emerges that sectors characterized by a higher recourse to external sources to finance investments, and sectors investing relatively more in new plants and machineries, are the most affected by endogenous monetary actions.

During the transformation process, the reform of public finances (in particular the tax system) is crucial for Georgia. There are a lot of proposals and suggestions in the financial literature concerning the introduction of tax systems in transition countries. Individual taxes or the entire tax system should be elaborated regarding certain criteria. This paper analyzes the tax reform procedures during the transition of Georgia to the free-market economy as well as the existing tax system. Concerning the taxes, the current tax system is more or less duplicated from the Western European countries. It becomes obvious that the chance of developing a rational, sustainable and adjusted tax system for transition countries was missed.

Tax estimation is a fundamental prerequisite for a sustainable fiscal policy. This paper uses the Georgian Household Survey and s simple microsimulation model in order to describe the household incomes in Georgia for the year 2005, their structure and regional distribution within eleven historical regions. Based on a thorough analysis of the existing taxable incomes and following the documentation of the applied model both a tax allowance and three percent raise of the income tax are estimated with respect to tax revenue and distributional effects. The paper comes to the conclusion that the poor income situation of most Georgian households can be mitigated by a tax allowance but is very difficult to be financed because of expected revenue losses. In spite of some progressive distributional effects of an increase of the tax burden, most households will find a very hard to cope with additional tax liabilities.

This paper analyzes fundamental shortcomings in the Georgian legal bases in both the constitution and the tax code with regard to a sustainable fiscal policy. It shows that the lack of experience with sharing political powers and competences among the administrative levels create centralizing tendencies, which are in sharp contrast to more recent laws on local selfgovernment. Having set the legal background of today’s administrative structure in Georgia, the paper continues to describe the country’s budget composition in terms of tax revenues and expenses since the year 2000. Following a brief discussion of the Georgian systems of transfers to subordinate administrative entities the paper concludes by naming essential reform steps that need to be taken towards the development of a functioning fiscal policy on all levels.

The paper tries to shed some light on the problems of centralization and decentralization within an economic union and the federal member states. Integration and decentralization are not opposite policy strategies but both meaningful if the single public goods and services supplies are analyzed in more detail. Both strategies doubtlessly have advantages, which can be realized if the manifold possibilities are combined in an efficient approach of good governance. Best practice approaches in inter- or supra-national integration, fiscal federalism and taxation do exist and have to be successfully implemented. Obviously such a modern fiscal policy has to be accompanied by an appropriate monetary policy, which in an economic union has to be carried out by an independent central bank as one of the necessary countervailing powers in a democratic setting. A modern fiscal policy strategy efficiently controls budget deficits, which naturally have to be limited to finance reliable public investments. Such strategy has to be safeguarded through modern methods of budgeting and fiscal planning. Modern public management with a clear code of conduct for the government officials ensures corruption free administration.

The dissertation consists of three self-contained essays on Public Finance. “News Droughts, News Floods and U.S. Disaster Relief” studies the mass media's influence on the U.S. government response to about 5,000 natural disasters in developing countries in 1968-2002. These disasters took around 63,000 lives and affected 125 million people per year. Given the huge losses involved, it is essential that disaster relief is provided to those most in need. We show that U.S. disaster relief depends on the occurrence of other newsworthy events at the time of the disaster, such as the Olympic Games or the O.J. Simpson Trial, which are obviously unrelated to need. We argue that the only plausible explanation for this is that relief decisions are driven by news coverage of disasters, and that this news coverage is crowded out by other newsworthy events. “Fiscal Policy and Retirement in the Twentieth Century” proposes a model that explains the trend in labor supply among older workers through changes in fiscal policy, including social security. The essay re-introduces social security as a major determinant of retirement behavior, while simultaneously offering an explanation to the two main puzzles in the literature: (i) the small contemporary retirement elasticities and (ii) the drop in the retirement age prior to the introduction of social security. “Sustainable Fiscal Policy and the Retirement Decision” concerns the sustainability of fiscal policy in aging economies and the retirement decision. The essay develops an applied general equilibrium model, where the retirement age is endogenous and current fiscal policy is a response to future demographic developments. Three policies are analyzed: (1) raising taxes (2) reducing the replacement rate and (3) raising the Full Retirement Age. All policies are found to have a substantial impact on retirement. Sustaining fiscal policy will result in falling interest rates, inducing a general delay in retirement. This general equilibrium effect on retirement can be substantially larger than the direct effect of changing social security incentives.

<p>This dissertation consists of two chapters studying monetary and fiscal policy. In the first chapter, I study the welfare benefits and costs of increased central bank transparency in a dynamic model of costly information acquisition where agents can either choose to gather new costly information or remember information from the past for free. Information is costly to acquire due to an agent's limited attention. Agents face an intratemporal decision on how to allocate attention across public and private signals within the period and an intertemporal decision on how to allocate attention over time. The model embeds a coordination externality into the dynamic framework which motivates agents to be overly attentive to public information and creates the possibility of costly transparency. Interestingly, allowing for intratemporal and intertempral tradeoffs for attention amplifies (attenuates) the benefits (costs) of earlier transparency whereas it attenuates (amplifies) the benefits (costs) of delayed transparency. </p><p>The second chapter, co-authored with Barbara Rossi and Atsushi Inoue, studies the empirical effects of unexpected changes in government spending and tax policy on heterogeneous agents. We use data from the Consumption Expenditure Survey (CEX) to estimate individual-level impulse responses as well as multipliers for government spending and tax policy shocks. The main empirical finding of this paper is that unexpected fiscal shocks have substantially different effects on consumers depending on their age, income levels, and education. In particular, the wealthiest individuals tend to behave according to the predictions of standard RBC models, whereas the poorest individuals tend to behave according to standard IS-LM (non-Ricardian) models, due to credit constraints. Furthermore, government spending policy shocks tend to decrease consumption inequality, whereas tax policy shocks most negatively affect the lives of the poor, more so than the rich, thus increasing consumption inequality.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation consists of three independent essays in macroeconomics. The first essay studies the transition to a low carbon economy using an extension of the neoclassical growth model featuring endogenous energy efficiency, exhaustible energy and explicit climate-economy interaction. I derive the properties of the laissez faire equilibrium and compare them to the optimal allocations of a social planner who internalizes the climate change externality. Three main results emerge. First, the exhaustibility of energy generates strong market based incentives to improve energy efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions without any government intervention. Second, the market and optimal allocations are substantially different suggesting a role for the government. Third, high and persistent taxes are required to implement the optimal allocations as a competitive equilibrium with taxes. The second essay focuses on coal fired power plants (CFPP) - one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions globally - and their generation efficiency using a macroeconomic model with an embedded CFPP sector. A key feature of the model is the endogenous choice of production technologies which differ in their energy efficiency. After establishing four empirical facts about the CFPP sector, I analyze the long run quantitative effects of energy taxes. Using the calibrated model, I find that sector-specific coal taxes have large effects on generation efficiency by inducing the use of more efficient technologies. Moreover, such taxes achieve large CO2 emissions reductions with relatively small effects on consumption and output. The final essay studies the procyclicality of fiscal policy in developing countries, which is a well-documented empirical observation seemingly at odds with Neoclassical and Keynesian policy prescriptions. I examine this issue by solving the optimal fiscal policy problem of a small open economy government when the interest rates on external debt are endogenous. Given an incomplete asset market, endogeneity is achieved by removing the government's ability to commit to repaying its external obligations. When calibrated to Argentina, the model generates procyclical government spending and countercyclical labor income tax rates. Simultaneously, the model's implications for key business cycle moments align well with the data.

This dissertation consists of three independent essays in macroeconomics. The first essay studies the transition to a low carbon economy using an extension of the neoclassical growth model featuring endogenous energy efficiency, exhaustible energy and explicit climate-economy interaction. I derive the properties of the laissez faire equilibrium and compare them to the optimal allocations of a social planner who internalizes the climate change externality. Three main results emerge. First, the exhaustibility of energy generates strong market based incentives to improve energy efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions without any government intervention. Second, the market and optimal allocations are substantially different suggesting a role for the government. Third, high and persistent taxes are required to implement the optimal allocations as a competitive equilibrium with taxes. The second essay focuses on coal fired power plants (CFPP) - one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions globally - and their generation efficiency using a macroeconomic model with an embedded CFPP sector. A key feature of the model is the endogenous choice of production technologies which differ in their energy efficiency. After establishing four empirical facts about the CFPP sector, I analyze the long run quantitative effects of energy taxes. Using the calibrated model, I find that sector-specific coal taxes have large effects on generation efficiency by inducing the use of more efficient technologies. Moreover, such taxes achieve large CO2 emissions reductions with relatively small effects on consumption and output. The final essay studies the procyclicality of fiscal policy in developing countries, which is a well-documented empirical observation seemingly at odds with Neoclassical and Keynesian policy prescriptions. I examine this issue by solving the optimal fiscal policy problem of a small open economy government when the interest rates on external debt are endogenous. Given an incomplete asset market, endogeneity is achieved by removing the government's ability to commit to repaying its external obligations. When calibrated to Argentina, the model generates procyclical government spending and countercyclical labor income tax rates. Simultaneously, the model's implications for key business cycle moments align well with the data.

Unanticipated economic fluctuations exert pressure on state governments to adjust their discretionary fiscal policies to accommodate the changing fiscal situation. Even though states adjust fiscal policy as the economy fluctuates, the typical cyclical economic factors are not the sole determinant of such adjustments. State governments budgeting systems in the United States operate under a variety of budgetary institutions. The most prominent state government budgetary institutions include balanced budget rules (BBRs), tax and expenditure limits (TELs), and supermajority voting requirements for tax increases. This dissertation examines how these budgetary institutions affect state government choices of fiscal policy under different economic conditions. To better understand the effect of state level TELs, a stringency index of state level TEL is constructed considering the major structural features. The fixed-effect panel regressions are used for the analysis of impact of TEL and BBR and tax changes and the fixed-effect Tobit is adopted to test the impact of TEL and BBR on spending cuts after the budget is adopted. The result suggests that TEL plays a more important role affecting states discretionary fiscal adjustment from the tax side, while BBR plays a more important role affecting states discretionary fiscal adjustment from the expenditure side. Results of this research show that TEL exerts pressure on states that hinder state ability to deal with volatile fiscal situations, especially in the case of periods of budget crises.