The recent recession has brought fiscal policy back to the forefront, with economists and policy makers struggling to reach a consensus on highly political issues like tax rates and government spending. At the heart of the debate are fiscal multipliers, whose size and sensitivity determine the power of such policies to influence economic growth. Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis focuses on the effects of fiscal stimuli and increased government spending, with contributions that consider the measurement of the multiplier effect and its size. In the face of uncertainty over the sustainability of recent economic policies, further contributions to this volume discuss the merits of alternate means of debt reduction through decreased government spending or increased taxes. A final section examines how the short-term political forces driving fiscal policy might be balanced with aspects of the long-term planning governing monetary policy. A direct intervention in timely debates, Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis offers invaluable insights about various responses to the recent financial crisis.

There is much debate about the usefulness of the neoclassical growth model for assessing the macro-economic impact of fiscal shocks. We test the theory using data from World War II, which is by far the largest fiscal shock in the history of the United States. We take observed changes in fiscal policy during the war as inputs into a parameterized, dynamic general equilibrium model and compare the values of all variables in the model to the actual values of these variables in the data. Our main finding is that the theory quantitatively accounts for macroeconomic activity during this big fiscal shock.

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual provides a forum for important debates in contemporary macroeconomics and major developments in the theory of macroeconomic analysis and policy that include leading economists from a variety of fields. The papers and accompanying discussions in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2007 address exchange-rate models; implications of credit market frictions; cyclical budgetary policy and economic growth; the impacts of shocks to government spending on consumption, real wages, and employment; dynamic macroeconomic models; and the role of cyclical entry of new firms and products on the nature of business-cycle fluctuations and on the effects of monetary policy.

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The focus is on the size of fiscal multipliers, and on the possibility that multipliers can turn negative (i.e., that fiscal contractions can be expansionary). The paper concludes that fiscal multipliers are overwhelmingly positive but small. However, there is some evidence of negative fiscal multipliers.

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in late 2002 and 2003 challenged the global public health community to confront a novel epidemic that spread rapidly from its origins in southern China until it had reached more than 25 other countries within a matter of months. In addition to the number of patients infected with the SARS virus, the disease had profound economic and political repercussions in many of the affected regions. Recent reports of isolated new SARS cases and a fear that the disease could reemerge and spread have put public health officials on high alert for any indications of possible new outbreaks. This report examines the response to SARS by public health systems in individual countries, the biology of the SARS coronavirus and related coronaviruses in animals, the economic and political fallout of the SARS epidemic, quarantine law and other public health measures that apply to combating infectious diseases, and the role of international organizations and scientific cooperation in halting the spread of SARS. The report provides an illuminating survey of findings from the epidemic, along with an assessment of what might be needed in order to contain any future outbreaks of SARS or other emerging infections.

A new approach for introducing unemployment into the New Keynesian framework. The past fifteen years have witnessed the rise of the New Keynesian model as a framework of reference for the analysis of fluctuations and stabilization policies. That framework, which combines the rigor and internal consistency of dynamic general equilibrium models with such typically Keynesian assumptions as monopolistic competition and nominal rigidities, makes possible a meaningful, welfare-based analysis of the effects of monetary policy rules. But the conspicuous absence of unemployment from the standard New Keynesian model has given rise to both criticism and attempts to rectify this anomaly. In this book, Jordi Galí, one of the major contributors to the New Keynesian literature, offers a new approach to introducing unemployment into that framework. Galí's approach involves a reinterpretation of the labor market in the standard New Keynesian model with staggered wage setting (rather than a modification or extension of the model, as has been proposed by others). The resulting framework preserves the convenience of the representative household paradigm and allows one to determine the equilibrium levels of employment, the labor force, and hence the unemployment rate conditional on the monetary policy in place. Galí develops the basic model, embedding it in a standard New Keynesian framework with staggered price and wage setting; revisits the relationship between economic fluctuations and efficiency through the lens of the new model, developing a measure of the output gap; and analyzes the relation between unemployment and the design of monetary policy.

Economics: Advances in Research and Application: 2011 Edition is a ScholarlyEditions™ eBook that delivers timely, authoritative, and comprehensive information about Economics and Organizations. The editors have built Economics: Advances in Research and Application: 2011 Edition on the vast information databases of ScholarlyNews.™ You can expect the information about Economics and Organizations in this eBook to be deeper than what you can access anywhere else, as well as consistently reliable, authoritative, informed, and relevant. The content of Economics: Advances in Research and Application: 2011 Edition has been produced by the world’s leading scientists, engineers, analysts, research institutions, and companies. All of the content is from peer-reviewed sources, and all of it is written, assembled, and edited by the editors at ScholarlyEditions™ and available exclusively from us. You now have a source you can cite with authority, confidence, and credibility. More information is available at http://www.ScholarlyEditions.com/.