Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports
Defi cits, Public Debt Dynamics, and Tax and Spending Multipliers
Matthew Denes Gauti B. Eggertsson Sophia Gilbukh
Staff Report No. 551 February 2012 Revised September 2012
FRBNY Staff REPORTS
This paper presents preliminary fi ndings and is being distributed to economists and other interested readers solely to stimulate discussion and elicit comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and are not necessarily refl ective of views at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors. Defi cits, Public Debt Dynamics, and Tax and Spending Multipliers Matthew Denes, Gauti B. Eggertsson, and Sophia Gilbukh Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no. 551 February 2012; revised September 2012 JEL classifi cation: E52, E62
Abstract
Cutting government spending can increase the budget defi cit at zero interest rates accord- ing to a standard New Keynesian model, calibrated with Bayesian methods. Similarly, increasing sales taxes can increase the budget defi cit rather than reduce it. Both results suggest limitations of “austerity measures.” At zero interest rates, running budget defi cits can be either expansionary or contractionary depending on how they interact with expec- tations about long-run taxes and spending. The effect of fi scal policy action is thus highly dependent on the policy regime. A successful stimulus, therefore, needs to specify how the budget is managed, not only in the short but also in the medium and long runs.
Key words: fi scal policy, liquidity trap
Denes: University of Pennsylvania. Eggertsson, Gilbukh: Federal Reserve Bank of New York (e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]). The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily refl ect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. 1 Introduction
What is the e¤ect of government spending cuts or tax hikes on the budget de…cit? What is the e¤ect of the budget de…cit itself on short-run and long-run outcomes? Does the answer to these questions depend upon the state of the economy? Does it matter, for example, if the short-term nominal interest rate is close to zero and the economy is experiencing a recession? These are basic and fundamental questions in macroeconomics that have received increasing attention recently. Following the crisis of 2008, many governments implemented somewhat expansionary …scal policy, but were soon confronted with large increases in public debt. That gave rise to calls for “austerity”, i.e. government spending cuts and tax hikes – aimed to decrease government debt – a policy many claimed was necessary to restore “con…dence.”It follows that a model of the economy that makes sense of the policy discussion during this time has to account for the crisis and provide a role for …scal policy, while also explicitly accounting for public debt dynamics. That is the objective of this paper. The goal of this paper is to analyze public debt dynamics in a standard New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model in a low interest rate environment. One of our main …ndings is that the rules for budget management change once the short- term nominal interest rate approaches zero in a way that is important for the debate on “austerity”and “con…dence.”This shows up in our model in at least two ways. First, we show that once the short-term nominal interest rate hits zero, then cutting government spending or raising sales taxes has very di¤erent e¤ects on de…cits than under regular circumstances. Under regular circumstances, these austerity policies reduce the de…cit roughly one-to-one. Once the nominal interest rate reaches zero, however, their e¤ect becomes much smaller on the de…cit. These policies may even increase rather than reduce the de…cit. Second, we …nd that the economy is extraordinarily sensitive to expectations about the long-run at a zero interest rate. In particular, expectations about the future size of the government and future sales and/or labor taxes can have strong e¤ects on short-run demand. This is, again, in contrast to an economy where the nominal interest rate is positive and the central bank targets zero in‡ation. In that environment, we show that long-run expectations about …scal policy have no e¤ect on short-run demand. An important implication of this is that in a low interest rate environment budget de…cits can either increase or reduce aggregate demand in the short run, depending on how they in‡uence expectations of future taxes, spending, and monetary policy. Hence the e¤ect of de…cit spending when the nominal interest rate is zero depends critically on the policy
1 regime. At a basic level, our paper highlights a general theme already emphasized in Eggertsson (2010) that once the nominal interest rate collapses close to zero, then the economy is demand-determined, i.e. the amount of stu¤ produced is entirely determined by how much stu¤ people want to buy. Thus, according to this framework, all emphasis should be on policies that increase aggregate spending in the short run. A key point this paper highlights is that short-run demand at a zero interest rate is not only determined by short-run …scal policy, but also by expectations about the long run. The budget de…cit is plausibly going to play a large role in how those long-run expectations are determined. More importantly, the way in which the budget de…cit pins down those expectations depends critically upon the policy regime and can substantially a¤ect estimates of various policy relevant issues, such as the computation of …scal multipliers currently common in the literature. The outline of the paper is detailed next. After laying out and parameterizing the model (Section 2), we …rst confront it (Section 3) with the following thought experiment: Suppose there are economic conditions such that the nominal interest rate is close to zero and the central bank wants to cut rates further, but cannot. Suppose sales and labor tax rates are held constant. How does the budget de…cit change if the government tries to balance the budget by cutting government spend- ing, i.e. implementing “austerity measures”? The model suggests that, under reasonable parameters, the de…cit declines only by a modest amount and may even increase, rather than decrease. This occurs because the cut in government spending leads to a reduction in aggregate output, thus reducing the tax base and subsequently reducing tax revenues. We derive simple analytical conditions under which the de…cit increases as a result of cuts in government spending. When we conduct the same experiment with sales taxes, we obtain a similar result. To a keen observer of the current economic turmoil, then, it may seem somewhat disturbing that expenditure cuts and sales tax increases were two quite popular “austerity measures”in response to the de…cits following the crisis of 2008. While the …rst set of results points against the popular call for “austerity,” we have a second set of results that puts these calls, perhaps, in a bit more sympathetic light. We next consider (Section 4) the following question: How does demand in the short run react to expectations about long-run taxes, long-run productivity and the long-run size of the government? One motivation for this question is that we often hear discussion about the importance of “con…dence” in the current economic environment and this is given as a rationale for reducing de…cits. For example, Jean-Claude Trichet, then President of
2 the European Central Bank, said in June 2010, “Everything that helps to increase the con…dence of households, …rms and investors in the sustainability of public …nances is good for the consolidation of growth and job creation. We …rmly believe that in the current circumstances con…dence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery, because con…dence is the key factor today.” How does current demand, via “con…dence,” depend on future long-run policy? To be clear, we interpret “con…dence” as referring to e¤ects on current demand that come about due to expectations about long-run policy. To get our second set of results, we consider how short-run demand depends upon expectations about long-run policy. We …rst look at the e¤ect of long-run taxes and the long-run size of the government on short-run demand if the central bank is not constrained by the zero interest rate bound and successfully targets constant in‡ation. In this case, we show that expectations of future …scal policy are irrelevant for aggregate demand. What happens in the model is that, if the central bank successfully targets in‡ation, it “replicates” the solution of the model that would take place if all prices were perfectly ‡exible, i.e. the “Real Business Cycle” (RBC) solution. Further, if all prices were ‡exible in the model, then aggregate demand would play no role in the …rst place. We then study the e¤ect of …scal policy expectations when there are large enough shocks so that the zero interest rate bound is binding and the central bank is unable to replicate the ‡exible price RBC solution. When this happens, the results are much more interesting: Output is completely demand-determined, i.e., the amount produced depends on how much people want to buy. Most importantly, expectations about future economic conditions start having an important e¤ect on short-run demand and, thus, output. In turn, future economic conditions depend on long-run policy. Our key …ndings are that a commitment to reduce the size of the government in the long run or to reduce future labor taxes increases short-run demand. This is because both policies imply higher future private consumption, and thus will tend to raise consumption demanded in the short run. It is worth noting that any policy that tends to increase expectations of future output will also be expansionary in the same way. Meanwhile, a commitment to lower long-run sales taxes has the opposite e¤ect, i.e., it reduces short-run demand. This is because lower future sales taxes induce people to delay short-run consumption to take advantage of lower future prices. In Section 5, we analyze how debt dynamics may a¤ect short-run demand. Taking short-run de…cits as given, we ask: What are their e¤ects on short-run demand given that they need to be paid o¤ in the long run? In this case, we show that the e¤ect of de…cits depends – as a general matter – on the policy regime. If the de…cits are paid o¤ by a
3 reduction in the long-run size of the government spending or higher long-run sale taxes, then the budget de…cits are expansionary. If they are paid o¤ by higher long-run labor taxes, then the budget de…cits are contractionary. In Section 6, we look at some numerical examples. Section 7 shows how the picture changes once we account for the possibility of the government defaulting on its debt. Finally, we review that de…cits are expansionary if they trigger expectations of medium-term in‡ation.
1.1 Related literature
The paper builds on Eggertsson (2010), who addresses the e¤ects of taxes and spending on the margin, and a relatively large amount of literature on the zero interest rate bound (see in particular Christiano, Eichenbaum and Rebelo (2011) and Woodford (2011) for related analysis and more recently Rendahl (2012)). The contribution of this paper to the existing literature is that we study public debt dynamics and the interactions between output and debt, and between taxes and spending. An additional feature of the current paper is the greater attention to the short-run demand consequences of long-run taxes and spending. While there is some discussion in Eggertsson (2010) on the e¤ect of permanent changes in …scal policy, we here make some additional, but plausible assumptions, that allow us to illustrate the result in a much cleaner form and additionally illustrate some new e¤ects. We consider the simple closed-form solution as a key contribution to the relatively large recent literature that studies the interaction of monetary and …scal policy at the zero bound (see e.g. Leeper, Traum, Walker (2011) and references therein). Our focus here is not on optimal policy. Instead we look at the e¤ect of incremental adjustments in various tax and spending instruments at the margin. The hope is, of course, that these partial results give some insights in the study of optimal policy. A challenge for thoroughly studying optimal policy with a rich set of taxes (such as here) is that, in principle, the …rst best allocation can often be replicated with ‡exible enough taxes, as illustrated in Eggertsson and Woodford (2004) and Correia et al. (2011). Yet, as the current crisis makes clear, governments are quite far away from exploiting …scal instruments to this extent. Most probably this re‡ects some unmodeled constraints on …scal policy that prevent their optimal application. But even with these limitations, we think it is still useful to understand the answer to more speci…c questions, such as “What happens to output and the de…cit if you do X?”The answer to this question often drives policy decisions. A politician, for example, may ask: “Can I reduce the budget de…cit by doing A, B or C?”
4 The result that cuts in government spending can increase the de…cit is close to the …nd- ing in Erceg and Linde (2010) that government spending can be self-…nancing in a liquidity trap. Relative to that paper, the main contribution is that we, …rst, show closed-form solu- tions for de…cit multipliers and, second, we model how expectations of long-run policy may change short-run demand. The demand e¤ect of the long-run labor tax policy is similar to that documented by Fernandez-Villaverde, Guerron-Quintana and Rubio-Ramirez (2011) and the permanent policies in Eggertsson (2010). The fact that a commitment to smaller government in the future can increase demand at the zero interest rate bound is illustrated in Eggertsson (2001) and Werning (2011). Eggertsson (2006) analyzes, in more detail, how de…cits can trigger in‡ation expectations.
2 A simple New Keynesian model
We only brie‡yreview the microfoundations of the model here, for a more complete treat- ment see Eggertsson (2010). The main di¤erence between our model and the model from Eggertsson (2010) is that we are more explicit about the government budget constraint. There is a continuum of households of measure 1. The representative household maximizes
1 1 T t Et u(CT ) + g(GT ) v(lT (j))dj ; T T =t 0 X Z 1 1 1 where is a discount factor, Ct ct(i) di is the Dixit-Stiglitz aggregate of 0 consumption of each of a continuum ofh di¤erentiatedi goods with an elasticity of substitution 1R 1 1 1 equal to > 1, Pt pt(i) di is the Dixit-Stiglitz price index, and lt(j) is the 0 quantity supplied of laborhR of type j.i Each industry j employs an industry-speci…c type of labor, with its own real wage Wt(j): The disturbance is a preference shock, and u( ) and t g( ) are increasing concave functions, while v( ) is an increasing convex function. GT is the government spending and is also de…ned as a Dixit-Stiglitz aggregate analogous to private consumption. For simplicity, we assume that the only assets traded are one-period riskless bonds, Bt. The period budget constraint can then be written as 1 s I (1 + t )PtCt + Bt = (1 + it 1)Bt 1 + (1 t ) Zt(i)di (1) 0 1 Z +Pt Wt(j)lt(j)dj PtTt; Z0 where Zt(i) stands for pro…ts that are distributed lump-sum to the households. There s are three types of taxes in the baseline model: a sales tax t on consumption purchases,
5 I a lump-sum tax Tt and an income tax t (levied on income from both labor and the household’s claim on …rms pro…ts).1 The household maximizes the utility subject to the budget constraint, taking the wage rate as given. It is possible to include some resource cost of the lump-sum taxes, for example that collecting Tt taxes consumes s(Tt) resources as in
Eggertsson (2006) and total government spending is then de…ned as Ft = Gt + s(Tt). Since we will not focus on the optimal policy, this alternative interpretation does not change any of the results. There is a continuum of …rms of measure 1. Firm i sets its price and then hires labor inputs necessary to meet realized demand, taking industry wages as given. A unit of labor produces one unit of output. The preferences of households and the assumption that the government distributes its spending on varieties in the same way as households imply a
pt(i) demand for good i of the form yt(i) = Yt( ) , where Yt Ct + Gt is aggregate output. Pt We assume that all pro…ts are paid out as dividends and that …rms seek to maximize pro…ts. Pro…ts can be written as Zt(i) = pt(i)Yt(pt(i)=Pt) Wt(j)Yt(pt(i)=Pt) ; where i indexes the …rm and j indexes the industry in which the …rm operates. Following Calvo (1983), let us suppose that each industry has an equal probability of reconsidering its price in each period. Let 0 < < 1 be the fraction of industries with prices that remain unchanged in each period. In any industry that revises its prices in period t, the new price pt will be the same. The maximization problem that each …rm faces at the time it revises its price is then to choose a price pt to maximize
1 T t P max Et ( ) T (1 T )[ptYT (pt=PT ) WT (j)YT (pt=PT ) ] ; pt (T =t ) X where T is the marginal utility of the nominal income for the representative household. An important assumption is that the price that the …rm sets is exclusive of the sales tax. This means that if the government cuts sales taxes, then consumers face a lower store price by exactly the amount of the tax cuts for …rms that have not reset their prices. Without going into details about how the central bank implements a desired path for
1 In an earlier variation of this paper, we assumed instead that only wages were subject to the income tax. Since wages are ‡exible, in this model, wages drop by more than output in a recession. This leads to a disproportionate drop in tax revenues in a recession that we felt exaggerated our results and relied too much on the complete ‡exibility of wages in the model. Under this alternative benchmark assumption, which is more conservative, income tax is proportional to aggregate output (any drop in real wages will be re‡ected by an increase in pro…ts, and taxing pro…t and wages at the same rate means we abstract from this redistribution aspect of the model).
6 nominal interest rates, we assume that it cannot be negative so that2
it 0: The government’sbudget constraint can now be written as3
1 s I s bt = (1 + it 1)bt 1t + (1 + t )Gt + (1 t )Yt Tt (1 + t )Yt,
Bt Pt where bt is the real value of the government debt and t is gross in‡ation. Pt Pt 1 s Note that we take into account that the government both pays the consumption tax t and receives this tax back as revenues. If we wrote the budget constraint in terms of private consumption, Ct; this would net out. The model is solved by an approximation around a steady state and we linearize it around a constant solution with positive government debt b > 0 and zero in‡ation4. The consumption Euler equation of the representative household combined with the resource constraint can be approximated to yield
e s s s Y^t = EtY^t+1 (it Ett+1 r ) + (G^t EtG^t+1) + Et(^ ^ ), (2) t t+1 t where it is the one-period risk-free nominal interest rate, t is in‡ation, Et is an expectation s s s s operator, the coe¢ cients are ; > 0; Y^t log Yt=Y , G^t log Gt=Y , while ^ , t t e and rt is an exogenous disturbance that is only a function of the shock t (for details see footnote on the rationale for this notation).5 Aggregate supply (AS) is
I I s s 1 t = Y^t + ( ^ + ^ G^t) + Ett+1; (3) t t where the coe¢ cients ; > 0 and 0 < < 1 and the zero bound is it 0. 2 See e.g. Eggertsson and Woodford (2003) for further discussion. 3 To derive this, note that since pro…ts by …rm i are given by Zt(i) = pt(i)Yt(pt(i)=Pt) PtWt(i)lt(i) where we have used the Dixit-Stiglitz demand to substitute for yt(i). Then, we can aggregate to obtain 1 1 YtPt = 0 Zt(i)di + Pt 0 Wt(j)lt(i)di: This can be substituted into the representative household budget constraint.R Then, usingR equation (1), we obtain the expression in the text. 4 The steady state level of debt, b, is not pinned down by our theory and thus we could pick various values for b.
5 uc vllL 1 The coe¢ cients of the model are de…ned as follows ;! ; 1 ; uccY vl +! 1 (1 )(1 ) +! 1+! ; where a bar denotes that the variable is de…ned in steady state. The shock is de- e ^ ^ ^ 1 I 1 …ned as r r + Et( ); where log = and r log : Finally we de…ne I and t t t+1 t t 1 s 1 s : In terms of our previous notation, it now actually refers to log(1 + it) in the log-linear model. 1+ Observe also that this variable, unlike the others, is not de…ned in deviations from steady state. We do this so that we can still express the zero bound simply as the requirement that it is nonnegative. For further discussion of this notation, see Eggertsson (2010).
7 The government budget constraint can be approximated to yield b ^ b ^ b s ^ I s ^ I C s ^ bt (1 +r )bt 1 = (1 +r )[^{t 1 t] + (1 + )Gt ( + )Yt ^t ^t Tt, (4) Y Y Y Y ^ where bt log Bt=Pt log b and T^t log Tt=Y . What remains to be speci…ed is government policy, i.e. how the government sets taxes, spending and monetary policy. We will be speci…c about this element of the model once we set up the shocks perturbing the economy.
2.1 The long run and short run: Output, in‡ation, budget de…cits
To solve the model and take the zero bound explicitly into account, we make use of a simple assumption now common in the literature based on Eggertsson and Woodford (2003).
e A1 In period 0, there is a shock rS < r which reverts to a steady state with a probability 1 in every period. We call the stochastic period in which the shock reverts to steady state tS and assume that (1 )(1 ) > 0: As discussed in Eggertsson (2010), we need to impose a bound on to avoid multiplicity which is stipulated at the end of A1.6 For …scal policy, we assume that
I s A2 ^ = ^ = G^t = 0 for t and future lump sum taxes T^t are set so that the government t t 8 budget constraint is satis…ed, while T^t = 0 for t < tS: 8 For monetary policy we assume that
A3 Short-term nominal interest rates are set so that t = 0. If this results in it < 0, we
assume it = 0 and t is endogenously determined.
By assumption 3, we focus on the equilibrium in which in‡ation is zero if it can be achieved taking the zero bound into account. In this paper, we do not address how this equilibrium is implemented, e.g. via which interest rate policy and …scal policy commit- ment, but there are several ways of doing this. What we are primarily interested in here is comparative statics for …scal policy in the short run when the zero bound is binding and the central bank is unable to target zero in‡ation so that in‡ation becomes an endoge- nous object. Given assumptions A1 and A2, the policy commitment in A3 implies that
6 See Mertens and Ravn (2010) for a discussion of multiple equilibria in this setting.
8 t = Y^t = 0 for t tS. In the short run, either t = Y^t = 0 (as long as the zero bound is e ^ not binding, i.e. it = rt > 0) or t and Yt are determined by the two equations
S ^ S S t = Yt + Ett+1 (5) S S S e Y^ = (1 )EtY^ + (1 )Et + r ; (6) t t+1 t+1 S
S where S denotes the short run and we have substituted for it = 0: These equations can be solved to yield the …rst proposition.
e Proposition 1 Suppose A1, A2, and A3 hold and that rt < 0: Then there is a unique bounded solution for output and in‡ation at zero short-term interest rates given by
1 e t = S = r < 0 for 0 t < tS (7) (1 )(1 ) S 1 e Y^t = Y^S = r < 0 for 0 t < tS: (8) (1 )(1 ) S The proof of this proposition follows from the fact that one eigenvalue of the system (5)-(6) has to be outside of the unit circle and the other inside it so the proof follows from Blanchard and Kahn (1983).7 Given this unique bounded solution, we will subsequently suppress the subscript t in the short run (when possible) and instead simply write S and
Y^S to denote the endogenous variables in the time periods 0 t < tS: We can also derive a short-run evolution of the de…cit. Recall that according to A2 we assume that the lump-sum taxes are at their steady state in the short run, i.e. T^t = 0 for 0 t < tS: Hence all adjustments will need to take place with long-run lump-sum taxes, while tax rates stay constant throughout. Under these assumptions, we obtain the following proposition for short-run de…cits.
Proposition 2 Suppose A1, A2 and A3 hold. Then, the de…cit in the short run is given by b ^ b ^ b I s D^ S = bt (1 + {)bt 1 = (1 + {)[^{S S] ( + )Y^S Y Y Y e 0 if rS > 0 = [ b (1+{)+( I + s)(1 )] 8 b Y e e Y r (1 )(1 ) rS > 0 if rS < 0 <