A Neoclassical Perspective on Budget Deficits

Optimal Budget Deficits

Do Budget Deficits Cause Inflation ?

In 2004, the federal budget deficit stood at $412 billion and reached 4.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Though not at a record level, the deficit as a fraction of GDP is now the largest since the early 1980s. Moreover, the recent swing from surplus to deficit is the largest since the end of World War II (Figure 1). The flip side of deficit spending is that the amount of government de...

Twin Deficits An empirical analysis on the relationship between budget deficits and trade deficits in Argentina

The majority of existing literature on the twin deficits hypothesis focuses on its effects in economies already well developed. The theory suggests that there is a causal relationship between the budget deficit and trade deficit of a nation, a claim often debated in the economic community. This paper attempts to supplement existing literature by examining the causal relationship between budget ...

The Economic Effects of Restrictions on Government Budget Deficits

In overlapping-generations economies with perfect financial markets and lumpsum taxation, restrictions on the government budget deficit do not limit the set of achievable allocations. For economies in which the tax instruments are distortionary and limited in number, this strong form of irrelevance does not hold even if markets are perfect. We propose a weaker (but natural) definition of irrele...

Technological Change and the Roaring Twenties: A Neoclassical Perspective

Annualized output growth in the United States was highest during the 1920s, as compared to any other of Field’s (2003, 2009) growth cycles. This motivates us to address the causes of the Roaring Twenties in the United States. In particular, we use a version of the real business cycle model to test the hypothesis that an extraordinary pace of productivity growth was the driving factor. Our motiv...