Creating Expectations

如果前瞻性经济主体今天的行为是由他们对明天的预期驱动的，那么政府能否通过创造预期来影响经济？更准确地说，政府能否通过巧妙地管理和引导公众对当前和未来政策的看法，在不实际支出太多的情况下，促进当前的经济活动和就业？难道言语比行动更响亮吗？我们在20世纪最重要的宏观经济成功故事之一的背景下研究这个问题，迄今为止，这个故事已经推翻了文献中提出的解释：德国经济从1933年纳粹统治下的大萧条中复苏。我们的项目回顾了上世纪30年代德国经济复苏的原因，提出一旦考虑到创造预期的影响，是否必须从根本上重新评估财政政策作为经济复苏推动力的作用。我们的出发点是，财政政策从预期的那一刻起就会有效，因此远早于实际实施。因此，我们的中心假设是，纳粹的沟通和宣传努力提高了财政刺激的有效性，远远超过了其实际规模。财政宣传可能通过三个渠道影响人们的看法。最重要的是，人们开始期待长期和持续的公共投资努力，因为大量使用关于高速公路建设和公共工作项目的宣传，可信地将新政权的合法性与这些项目的成功联系在一起。此外，在一个信息不完全的世界里，宣传还可以通过两个额外的渠道增加公共支出的效果：通过使财政支出的积极影响看起来比实际更大，以及通过使用大众媒体将政策知识传播给更多的人口。拟建项目由三部分组成。第一部分的目的是编制一个新的关于财政宣传和财政支出的历史数据集。为了获得财政宣传的量化措施，我们对一系列德国国家和地区报纸以及广播进行了数字化和预处理。之后，我们应用定量文本分析技术，以便从这些来源中提取有关纳粹财政宣传强度的经验证据。第二个项目将使用新的宣传数据，在贝叶斯VAR模型中研究它如何影响财政政策的传导。在第三个项目中，我们从区域视角出发，计算了区域财政支出的效应。利用军费作为财政支出的工具，我们估计了财政政策对低（高）财政宣传强度地区就业的影响。这使我们能够探讨强有力的财政宣传如何影响乘数，从而影响乘数在德国从大萧条中复苏中的作用。

If the behavior of forward-looking economic agents today is driven by their expectations about tomorrow, can governments influence the economy by creating expectations? More precisely, can governments, by skillfully managing and guiding the public’s perception of present and future policies, boost economic activity and employment in the present without actually spending much? Do words speak louder than deeds after all?We study this question in the context of one of the most consequential macroeconomic success stories of the 20th century that so far has defied the explanations advanced in the literature: the recovery of the German economy from the Great Depression under the Nazis from 1933 onwards. Revisiting the causes of the German recovery in the 1930s, our project asks if the role of fiscal policy as a driver of the recovery has to be fundamentally reassessed once the effects of expectation creation are considered. We start from the idea that fiscal policy is effective from the moment onwards it is expected, and hence well before it is actually implemented. Thus, our central hypothesis is that Nazi communication and propaganda efforts boosted the effectiveness of the fiscal stimulus much beyond its actual size. Fiscal propaganda likely influenced perceptions through three channels. Most importantly, people came to expect a long and sustained public investment effort as the heavy use of propaganda about highway construction and public work programs credibly tied the legitimacy of the new regime to the success of these programs. In addition, in a world of imperfect information, propaganda can also increase the effects of public spending through two additional channels: by making the positive effects of fiscal spending appear bigger than they were, and by spreading the knowledge of the policy across larger parts of the population through the use of mass media. The proposed project consists of three parts. The objective of the first part is to compile a new historical dataset on fiscal propaganda and fiscal spending. To obtain a quantitative measure for fiscal propaganda we digitize and preprocess a range of German national and regional newspapers as well as radio broadcasts. Afterwards, we apply quantitative text analysis techniques in order to extract empirical evidence on the intensity of Nazi fiscal propaganda from these sources. The second project will use the new data on propaganda to study how it affects the transmission of fiscal policy in a Bayesian VAR model. In the third project we take a regional perspective and compute the effect of regional fiscal spending. Using military spending as an instrument for fiscal spending, we estimate the effects of fiscal policy on employment in regions with low (high) fiscal propaganda intensity. This allows us to explore how strong fiscal propaganda affected the multiplier and thus its role for the German recovery from the Great Depression.