The composition of public spending and the inflationary effects of fiscal policy shocks

Abstract

The paper uses structural proxy-vector autoregressions to separately identify shocks to US government investment and government consumption expenditures. Positive public investment shocks robustly raise inflation and have a weak and insignificant impact on labor productivity. In contrast, positive public consumption shocks induce a significant fall in inflation together with a strong and persistent increase in hourly productivity. The empirical findings are consistent with a model where demand shocks have an endogenous effect on productivity due to variable technology utilization. Increases in government investment, despite adding to a productive public capital stock, induce a relatively low endogenous increase in productivity and goods supply in the short run and thus are inflationary, whereas government consumption shocks can lead to a temporary productivity increase and inflation decrease if technology utilization is relatively inexpensive to vary.