Economic Essay

FRBSF Economic Letter   2018-18 | July 9, 2018 | Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

 

 

Fiscal Policy in Good Times and Bad Tim Mahedy and Daniel J. Wilson

Thanks in large part to recently enacted tax cuts, U.S. fiscal policy has taken a decidedly procyclical turn—providing stimulus when the economy is growing. In fact, the projected increase in the federal deficit over the next few years would represent the most procyclical fiscal policy stance since the Vietnam War. This matters because many recent studies have found that fiscal stimulus has a smaller impact when the economy is strong, implying that the near-term boost to GDP growth could be two-thirds or less of that from previous tax cuts.

At the end of last year, Congress passed the most significant change in the U.S. tax code since 1986, the Tax

Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The Joint Committee on Taxation puts the size of the tax cuts at $1.5 trillion

over 10 years, with about half of the revenue costs coming in the first three years due to the phase-out of

some key provisions after 2020. Many macroeconomic forecasters expect the TCJA to significantly boost

U.S. GDP growth over the next couple of years.

The tax act arrives at a time when the U.S. economy is well into its eighth year of expansion—one of the

longest expansions since World War II—with resource utilization considered tight by nearly every measure.

Thus, the TCJA is in essence a large, mostly temporary tax cut hitting a hot economy—in other words, the

stimulus is procyclical. In this Economic Letter, we assess just how procyclical the current and near-term

fiscal policy is, how unusual this procyclicality is relative to past trends, and whether it matters for the

macroeconomic effects of this stimulus.

The usual cyclicality of U.S. federal fiscal policy

From a macroeconomic perspective, the stance of federal fiscal policy can be summarized by movements in

the primary deficit as a share of GDP. The primary deficit is the difference between federal government

spending, excluding debt interest payments, and revenue. Historically, the deficit has been highly

countercyclical, meaning that it rises during economic slowdowns and falls during expansions. This

countercyclicality is driven by both the spending side and revenue side and by both discretionary or

“activist” policies and automatic or “passive” policies. Discretionary policies are changes to government

spending or taxation due to legislative actions, while automatic policies are previously enacted tax and

spending programs that are triggered directly or indirectly by the state of the economy. On the revenue

side, the federal tax base, formed primarily by individual incomes and corporate profits, and in turn tax

revenue automatically grow faster in economic expansions than in recessions. In addition, federal

policymakers often enact temporary tax relief packages during downturns, for example, the 2001 and 2008

tax rebates.

FRBSF Economic Letter 2018-18 July 9, 2018

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Conversely, government spending tends to be highly countercyclical. This is partly because a lot of

government spending consists of so-called automatic stabilizer programs like unemployment insurance,

Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. These programs are designed such that the

number of people eligible for benefits increases in economic downturns and decreases in expansions. In

addition, federal policymakers often enact temporary increases in discretionary spending during

downturns, as was the case with the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

To quantify the cyclicality of federal fiscal policy, we follow the approach of Lucking and Wilson (2012) in

estimating the average relationship between the primary deficit and a measure of the business cycle. We

measure the cycle using the output gap—the difference between potential GDP and actual GDP—according

to the Congressional Budget Office. Using the CBO’s measure of the unemployment gap or the

unemployment rate itself leads to very similar results. We estimate the relationship between the deficit, as

measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and the output gap using a regression analysis of

quarterly data from 1960 through 2017. We then use that estimated relationship to infer the “cyclical

component” of the deficit, shown as the red line in Figure 1. The actual deficit is shown as the blue line.

Note that the BEA’s quarterly deficit

data include a large transitory

adjustment of $250 billion in the fourth

quarter of 2017 to reflect the accrual of

foreign assets of U.S. corporations that

became subject to the TCJA’s new

repatriation tax. We remove this one-

time blip from the chart for visual

clarity. The grey bars indicate recession

periods, according to the National

Bureau of Economic Research.

The countercyclical nature of the deficit

discussed above is clear in Figure 1. The

cyclical component series demonstrates

how strong this pattern is. The cyclical

deficit typically climbs during times of

recession, then falls as the economy

recovers. In fact, since World War II, the only time the deficit was notably procyclical—that is, divergent

from its cyclical component—was in the late 1960s, when the nation was engaged in the Vietnam War; at

that time, military outlays, and hence overall government spending, rose sharply in the midst of a

prolonged economic expansion.

Fiscal policy projections

The dashed lines to the right of the vertical dashed line in Figure 1 are projections through the end of 2020.

We project the actual primary deficit using the CBO’s most recent annual projections from the April 2018

Budget and Economic Outlook, interpolated to a quarterly frequency. We project the cyclical component by

plugging the CBO’s output gap projection into our estimate of the historical relationship between the

output gap and the deficit.

Figure 1 Federal primary deficit and its cyclical component

Source: BEA, CBO, and authors’ calculations. Gray bars indicate NBER recession dates.

-6

-4

-2

0

2

4

6

8

10

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

Cyclical component

Actual

% of GDP

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We find that, while the cyclical component of the deficit is expected to fall in the next few years, the actual

deficit is projected to rise. This divergence in the directions of the deficit and its cyclical component

suggests that U.S. federal fiscal policy is expected to be strongly procyclical over the next few years. Based

on historical trends, this projected divergence between the actual deficit and its cyclical component is

highly unusual.

Implications of fiscal policy in good times

The projected procyclical policy over the next few years may raise concerns regarding the nation’s fiscal

capacity to respond to future downturns and its ability to manage the growing federal debt. However, it

also has important implications for the macroeconomic impact of the fiscal stimulus represented by the

TCJA and the consequent increase in the deficit.

A burgeoning economic literature has studied whether fiscal stimulus affects the macroeconomy differently

in good times than it does in bad times. Some studies directly estimate the so-called fiscal multiplier—the

response of GDP to a policy change affecting government spending or tax revenue—and test whether this

multiplier depends on the state of the economy. This is challenging given the historical rarity of stimulative

fiscal policy in good times or contractionary fiscal policy in bad times at the federal level. Therefore,

researchers have typically turned to data at the state level or from other countries to estimate separate

fiscal multipliers for procyclical and countercyclical stimulus.

The predominant research finding is that the fiscal multiplier is smaller during expansions than during

recessions. For example, Nakamura and Steinsson (2014) and Leduc and Wilson (2012) estimate state-

level GDP multipliers on federal military spending and federal highway spending, respectively, and find

that the spending multiplier tends to be much larger in states experiencing more resource slack from such

things as higher unemployment. Similarly, Shoag (2010) finds that the response of employment and

personal income to a boost in state government spending increases with the level of a state’s

unemployment rate.

Auerbach and Gorodnichenko (2012) and Jordá and Taylor (2016) estimate the national GDP multiplier on

government spending using a panel of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and

Development and find that the multiplier is considerably smaller in expansions than in recessions. There

are few contrary studies, but one prominent case is Ramey and Zubairy (2018), which estimates the

multiplier on defense-driven government spending in the United States using a historical data set going

back to 1889. The long history and focus on defense spending helps overcome the empirical challenges

posed by the rarity of procyclical federal spending boosts. Ramey and Zubairy find that the GDP multiplier

for this spending is relatively low and is independent of the state of the economy.

These studies focus on the multiplier based on government spending. There has been scant empirical

research on the link between the state of the economy and the macroeconomic impacts of tax changes.

Again, the rarity of procyclical tax cuts or countercyclical tax hikes helps explain this scarcity of research.

However, microeconomic research on the state of the economy and “marginal propensities to consume”

(MPCs) offer important insights because standard economic theory draws a tight link between them and

fiscal tax multipliers, which measure the growth in the economy generated from a dollar of tax cuts. An

individual’s MPC is the fraction of a dollar of new income that he or she spends.

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Numerous microeconomic studies have shown that individuals who are liquidity constrained—meaning

that they are unable to borrow or easily liquidate assets to finance spending—tend to have higher MPCs.

Since the proportion of the population that is liquidity constrained generally falls during expansions, these

results suggest that the average MPC in the economy, and in turn the fiscal multiplier, should also fall in

expansions. In addition, a recent paper by Gross, Notowidigdo, and Wang (2018) finds that the MPC was

20-30% higher in the Great Recession compared with other recent years. Given the standard theoretical

link between the MPC and the multiplier, this finding implies that the tax multiplier in recessions is at least

20-30% higher than in expansions.

To put the above results in perspective, note that a number of macroeconomic forecasters expect the TCJA

to boost 2018 GDP growth by around a percentage point. The literature discussed above suggests the true

boost is more likely to be well below that, as small as zero according to some studies.

Conclusion

Recent U.S. federal fiscal policy has taken a decidedly procyclical turn, driven primarily by the large and

front-loaded tax cuts enacted by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Many analysts have forecast large

increases in GDP growth over the next two to three years as a result. However, recent research finds that

the effects of fiscal stimulus on overall economic activity are much smaller during expansions than during

downturns. This suggests these forecasts may be overly optimistic.

Tim Mahedy is a former associate economist in the Economic Research Department of the Federal

Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Daniel J. Wilson is vice president in the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

References

Auerbach, Alan, and Yuriy Gorodnichenko. 2012. “Measuring the Output Responses to Fiscal Policy.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 4(2), pp. 1–27.

Gross, Tai, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, and Jialan Wang. 2018. “The Marginal Propensity to Consume Over the Business Cycle.” Unpublished manuscript, Northwestern University. http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/noto/research/Gross-Noto-Wang MPC over cycle jan2018.pdf

Jordà, Òscar, and Alan M. Taylor. 2016. “The Time for Austerity: Estimating the Average Treatment Effect of Fiscal Policy.” Economic Journal 126(590), pp. 219–255.

Leduc, Sylvain, and Daniel J. Wilson. 2012. “Roads to Prosperity or Bridges to Nowhere? Theory and Evidence on the Impact of Public Infrastructure Investment.” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 27(1), pp. 89-142.

Lucking, Brian, and Daniel J. Wilson. 2012. “U.S. Fiscal Policy: Headwind or Tailwind?” FRBSF Economic Letter 2012- 20 (July 2). https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2012/july/us-fiscal-policy/

Nakamura, Emi, and Jón Steinsson. 2014. “Fiscal Stimulus in a Monetary Union: Evidence from U.S. Regions.” American Economic Review 104(3), pp. 753–792.

Ramey, Valerie, and Sarah Zubairy. 2018. “Government Spending Multipliers in Good Times and in Bad: Evidence from U.S. Historical Data.” Journal of Political Economy 126(2), pp. 850–901.

Shoag, Daniel. 2010. “The Impact of Government Spending Shocks: Evidence on the Multiplier from State Pension Plan Returns.” http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~shoag/papers.hmtl

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