Fiscal Policy, Productivity, and Growth: New Data and New Approaches

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This project aims to break new ground on the effects of fiscal policy on productivity and growth. A large theoretical and empirical literature studies the effects of government spending and taxation on the macro-economy and posits a Keynesian or a classical (labor) supply-side role for fiscal policy. I propose studying other under-explored channels through which fiscal policy may affect the economy. The first part of the proposal focuses on government spending and will rely on new data sources ranging from archival data from the Second World War to data extracted from post-war textual sources. Archival data on US production, procurement, and capital sales to study the effects of government spending and the spatial distribution of capital. I will study the effects of government purchases on TFP: Observed learning-by-doing in production catalyzed the early endogenous growth theory but hasn't yet been studied with modern empirical tools. Further, by 1941, the US economy was in full employment and I will investigate whether these high degrees of capacity utilization played a role in the learning process, i.e. does a "high pressure" economy lead to more innovation. Government-purchased capital that was resold at war-end give exogenous spatial variation in physical capital allowing a study the importance of capital (mis-)allocation. Post-war R&D military priorities will be used to investigate the government's effect on the direction of technological progress and its centrality in advancing "moonshot" research. The second part of the project will study the dynamic effects of tax reforms in modern macro data. Tax changes involve changes to both tax rates and the tax base. A theoretical framework I am developing suggests that existing empirical estimates may be biased because they confound changes to these two policy dimensions. I aim to highlight these theoretical transmission channels and provide theory-based empirical estimates that disentangle them.