Category Archives: Stimulus Impact

In an article in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, John Cogan and I review our research showing why the 2009 stimulus package did little to stimulate the economy, despite its large size. The reserch continues our earlier work showing why the … Continue reading →

Polls show that most Americans don’t believe that the stimulus package worked, but debate continues among economists. The most debated issue is the size of government purchases multiplier. Suppose that the government purchases multiplier is 1.5. Then Economics 1 students … Continue reading →

PBS Newshour hosted a live TV debate between Mark Zandi and me yesterday on the question of whether government interventions helped or hurt the economy. The show highlighted a paper by Alan Blinder and Zandi about which I posted comments … Continue reading →

Yesterday the New York Times published an article about simulations of the effects of fiscal stimulus packages and financial interventions using an old Keynesian model. The simulations were reported in an unpublished working paper by Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi. … Continue reading →

The 3.2 percent growth rate of real GDP in the first quarter (released by BEA yesterday) confirms that the recovery is looking more U-shaped than V-shaped. But it also provides further evidence that the stimulus package of 2009 has had … Continue reading →

Last Friday Macroeconomic Advisers (MA), a forecasting firm, posted a blog entry responding to empirical work by me and others on the “stimulus act” of 2009. I welcome the discussion, but unfortunately the blog seems to have missed the main … Continue reading →

With the one year anniversary of the signing of the stimulus it is useful to review the facts and data as they came in during the year. Here are the relevant posts from Economics One. Most look at actual data … Continue reading →

Friday’s data release from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) shows that real GDP growth rebounded to 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter from 2.2 percent in the third quarter of last year. The rebound was sharper when compared with … Continue reading →

In an interesting new paper, University of Chicago economists Thorsten Drautzburg and Harald Uhlig calculate the impact the $787 billion fiscal stimulus package passed last year. Previous research, such as the paper by John Cogan, Tobias Cwik, Volker Wieland and … Continue reading →

It’s been nearly a year since the stimulus package of 2009 was passed. Unfortunately most attempts to answer the question “What was the size of the impact?” are still based on economic models in which the answer is built-in, and … Continue reading →