Liquidity Constraints, the Composition of Government Expenditure, and Economic Growth

Abstract

This paper examines the impacts of liquidity constraints on economic growth and social welfare by incorporating the role of government expenditure into the overlapping-generations model developed by Jappelli and Pagano in 1990s. In our model, the government can provide funds to the young faced with liquidity constraints. Our theoretical findings are as follows: (1) with exogenous technical progress, liquidity constraints on households raise the saving rate; (2) with endogenous technical progress, liquidity constraints and economic growth rate show an inverted U-shaped relationship; (3) with both exogenous and endogenous technical progress, the steady state per capita income first increases and then declines with the increase of liquidity constraints. Our empirical analysis with cross-country data supported this conclusion; (4) given certain values of the model parameters, social welfare in steady state may decrease with the reduction of liquidity constraints.