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

该项目旨在就财政政策对生产率和增长的影响开辟新的天地。大量理论和实证文献研究了政府支出和税收对宏观经济的影响，并假定财政政策是凯恩斯主义的或经典的(劳动力)供应方角色。我建议研究财政政策可能影响经济的其他未被探索的渠道。提案的第一部分侧重于政府支出，将依赖于新的数据来源，从第二次世界大战的档案数据到从战后文本来源提取的数据。关于美国生产、采购和资本销售的档案数据，以研究政府支出的影响和资本的空间分布。我将研究政府购买对全要素生产率的影响：在生产中观察到的边做边学催化了早期的内生增长理论，但尚未用现代实证工具进行研究。此外，到1941年，美国经济处于充分就业状态，我将调查这些高度的产能利用率是否在学习过程中发挥了作用，即“高压”经济是否会带来更多创新。在战争结束时转售的政府购买的资本在实物资本中产生了外生的空间差异，这使得我们能够研究资本(不当)配置的重要性。战后的研发和军事优先事项将被用来调查政府在技术进步方向上的作用，以及它在推进“登月”研究中的中心地位。项目的第二部分将在现代宏观数据中研究税制改革的动态效应。税收变化涉及税率和税基的变化。我正在开发的一个理论框架表明，现有的经验估计可能是有偏差的，因为它们混淆了这两个政策维度的变化。我的目标是强调这些理论传播渠道，并提供基于理论的经验估计，以理清它们。

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.