This paper shows that part of what is usually labelled discretionary government spending actually varies systematically over the cycle. I exploit the pervasive gap between ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares local government spending multipliers to estimate how cyclical the systematic part of government spending is. Estimating a structural open-economy New Keynesian model on United States state-level data, I find that when employment decreases by $1\%$, the systematic component of government spending decreases by $0.23\%$. I also find that the empirical specification in Nakamura and Steinsson, ‘Fiscal Stimulus in a monetary union’ (American Economic Review, 2014) does a good job in recovering the true impact multiplier effect, but that it overestimates the long-run cumulative effect.

中文翻译：

---

周期性政府支出：理论与经验

本文表明，通常被称为可自由支配的政府支出的一部分实际上在整个周期内系统地变化。我利用普通最小二乘和两阶段最小二乘地方政府支出乘数之间的普遍差距来估计政府支出的系统部分的周期性。在美国州级数据上估计一个结构性开放经济新凯恩斯模型，我发现当就业减少 1 美元\%$ 时，政府支出的系统性部分减少 0.23 美元\%$。我还发现 Nakamura 和 Steinsson 中的实证规范“货币联盟中的财政刺激”（美国经济评论，2014 年）在恢复真正的影响乘数效应方面做得很好，但它高估了长期累积效应。