Government Purchases Over the Business Cycle: the Role of Heterogeneity and Wealth Bias in Political Decision Making

Jinhui Bai and Ruediger Bachmann

No 621, 2010 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper sets up and computes a stochastic neoclassical growth model where agents face uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk and heterogenous discount factors. Households value government purchases which are financed by income taxes. The government cannot commit to future streams of government purchases. We thus study the Markov perfect equilibria of such an economy. We also introduce a wealth bias into the political aggregation process. When exposed to standard aggregate productivity shocks, we show that such a model can explain three important features of government purchases in the data: government purchases are mildly procyclical, their dynamic correlation with one-year lagged output is higher than the corresponding contemporaneous correlation, and they are the most persistent component of aggregate demand. We also show that a representative agent model, models with insufficient wealth inequality and models with no wealth bias cannot explain these features of the data.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Politico-Economic Inequality and the Comovement of Government Purchases (2013)
Working Paper: Government Purchases Over the Business Cycle: the Role of Economic and Political Inequality (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed010:621

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2010 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().