Do Tax Cuts Starve the Beast?: The Effect of Tax Changes on Government Spending (2009)
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity - 2009, Number 1
Lecciones de la Gran Depresión para la recuperación económica en 2009 (2009)
Este artículo compara la Gran Depresión de los años treinta con la actual crisis mundial y presenta algunas lecciones útiles para el diseño de políticas que permitan superar la crisis y...
notice, is given to the source. A Rehabilitation of Monetary Policy in the 1950s (2002)
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer, Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer, Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
The views expressed herein are those of
Choosing the Federal Reserve Chair: Lessons from History
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
This paper uses the lessons of history to identify the sources of monetary policy successes and failures in the past and to suggest a strategy for choosing successful Federal Reserve chairs in the...
A New Measure of Monetary Shocks: Derivation and Implications
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
This paper develops a measure of U. S. monetary policy shocks for the period 1969–1996 that is relatively free of endogenous and anticipatory movements. Quantitative and narrative records are used...
Changes in the Cyclical Behavior of Individual Production Series
This paper uses simple time series techniques to analyze changes in the short-run behavior of 38 physical production series for 1889-1984. The main finding is that fluctuations in these output series...
The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression
This paper argues that the collapse of stock prices in October 1929 generated temporary uncertainty about future income which caused consumers to forego purchases of durable and semidurable goods in...
Does Monetary Policy Matter? A New Test in the Spirit of Friedman and Schwartz
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
This paper uses the historical record to isolate episodes in which there were large monetary disturbances not caused by output fluctuations. It then tests whether these monetary changes have...
Existing Estimates, New Estimates, and New Interpretations of World War I and its Aftermath
The paper examines the official Commerce Department estimates of gross national product for 1909-1928 and finds that they are far inferior to the less commonly used Kendrick GNP estimates. The paper...
The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
This paper investigates the impact of changes in the level of taxation on economic activity. We use the narrative record -- presidential speeches, executive-branch documents, and Congressional...
New Evidence on the Monetary Transmission Mechanism
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
macroeconomics, Monetary Transmission Mechanism
Federal Reserve Information and the Behavior of Interest Rates
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
This paper tests for the existence of asymmetric information between the Federal Reserve and the public by examining Federal Reserve and commercial inflation forecasts. It demonstrates that the...
Is the Stabilization of the Postwar Economy a Figment of the Data?
This study of output data for the periods 1866-1914 and 1947-82 shows that much of the apparent stabilization of the postwar economy is an artifact of the way the historical data are constructed....
Discussion of Hacker, Ward, and White
My assigned task is to discuss the three fine dissertations chosen as finalists for the Allan Nevins Prize. But, I want to start by mentioning the eight other dissertations that I read as part of the...
HSIEH, CHANG-TAI, ROMER, CHRISTINA D.
Could the Federal Reserve have reversed the decline in the money supply during the Great Depression without causing a loss of confidence in the U.S. commitment to the gold standard? This article uses...
New Evidence on the Monetary Transmission Mechanism
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
macroeconomics, Monetary Transmission Mechanism
New Evidence on the Monetary Transmission Mechanism
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
macroeconomics, Monetary Transmission Mechanism
Monetary policy and the well-being of the poor
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Poverty is arguably the most pressing economic problem of our time. And because rising inequality, for a given level of income,> implies greater poverty, the distribution of income is also a central...
Changes in Business Cycles: Evidence and Explanations
This paper shows that the volatility of annual real macroeconomic indicators for the United States and the average severity of recessions have declined only slightly between the pre-World War I and...
Monetary policy and the well-being of the poor
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Poverty is arguably the most pressing economic problem of our time. And because rising inequality, for a given level of income,> implies greater poverty, the distribution of income is also a central...
Credit channel or credit actions? an interpretation of the postwar transmission mechanism
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Credit ; Monetary policy
Credit channel or credit actions? an interpretation of the postwar transmission mechanism
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Credit ; Bank loans ; Monetary policy - United States ; Economic history ; Federal Reserve System - History
Monetary policy and the well-being of the poor
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Monetary policy ; Income distribution ; Poverty
The evolution of economic understanding and postwar stabilization policy
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Economic stabilization ; Fiscal policy ; Monetary policy
The Cyclical Behavior of Individual Production Series, 1889-1984.
This paper uses simple summary statistics to analyze the volatility, persistence, and comovement of thirty-eight annual individual production series for the period 1889-1984. It seeks to identify the...
The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression.
This paper argues that the collapse of stock prices in October 1929 generated temporary uncertainty about future income, which led consumers to forgo purchases of durable goods. That the Great Crash...
The Prewar Business Cycle Reconsidered: New Estimates of Gross NationalProduct, 1869-1918
This paper shows that the existing estimates of prewar gross national product exaggerate the size of cyclical fluctuations. The source of the exaggeration is that the original Kuznets estimates are...
What Ended the Great Depression?
This paper examines the role of aggregate demand stimulus in ending the Great Depression. A simple calculation indicates that nearly all of the observed recovery of the U.S. economy prior to 1942 was...
Credit Channel or Credit Actions? An Interpretation of the Postwar Transmission Mechanism
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
This paper shows that the disproportionate impact of tight monetary policy on banks' ability to lend is largely the consequence of Federal Reserve actions aimed at reducing bank loans directly,...
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
This paper analyzes the contributions of monetary and fiscal policy to postwar economic recoveries. We find that the Federal Reserve typically responds to downturns with prompt and large reductions...
Historical Perspectives on the Monetary Transmission Mechanism
Jeffrey A. Miron, Christina D. Romer, David N. Weil
This paper examines changes over time in the importance of the lending channel in the transmission of monetary shocks to the real economy. We first use a simple extension of the Bernanke-Blinder...
This paper evaluates the consistency of the NBER business cycle reference dates over time. Analysis of the NBER methods suggests that the early turning points are derived from detrended data, while...
Inflation and the Growth Rate of Output
This paper shows that inflation has depended strongly on the growth rate of output for most of the twentieth century. Only in recent years has the deviation of output from trend become the...
Federal Reserve Private Information and the Behavior of Interest Rates
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Many authors argue that asymmetric information between the Federal Reserve and the public is important to the conduct and the effects of monetary policy. This paper tests for the existence of such...
Institutions for Monetary Stability
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
This paper demonstrates that failures in monetary policy arise not just from dynamic inconsistency, but more importantly, from imperfect understanding of the economy and the effects of policy. Using...
Monetary Policy and the Well-Being of the Poor
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
This paper investigates monetary policy's influence on poverty and inequality in both the short run and the long run. We find that the short-run and long-run relationships go in opposite directions....
Changes in Business Cycles: Evidence and Explanations
This paper analyzes changes in American business cycles over the twentieth century and suggests a possible explanation for the major changes that have and have not occurred. The empirical analysis...
Was the Federal Reserve Fettered? Devaluation Expectations in the 1932 Monetary Expansion
Chang-Tai Hsieh, Christina D. Romer
A key question about the Great Depression is whether expansionary monetary policy in the United States would have led to a loss of confidence in the U. S. commitment to the gold standard. This paper...
A Rehabilitation of Monetary Policy in the 1950s
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Monetary policy in the United States in the 1950s was remarkably modern. Analysis of Federal Reserve records shows that policymakers had an overarching aversion to inflation and were willing to...
The Evolution of Economic Understanding and Postwar Stabilization Policy
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
There have been large changes in the conduct of aggregate demand policy in the United States over the past fifty years. This paper shows that these changes in policy have resulted largely from...
A New Measure of Monetary Shocks: Derivation and Implications
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Conventional measures of monetary policy, such as the federal funds rate, are surely influenced by forces other than monetary policy. More importantly, central banks adjust policy in response to a...
Do Tax Cuts Starve the Beast: The Effect of Tax Changes on Government Spending
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
The hypothesis that decreases in taxes reduce future government spending is often cited as a reason for cutting taxes. However, because taxes change for many reasons, examinations of the relationship...
The FOMC versus the Staff: Where Can Monetary Policymakers Add Value?
Christina D. Romer, David H. Romer
Should monetary policymakers take the staff forecast of the effects of policy actions as given, or should they attempt to include additional information? This paper seeks to shed light on this...
The Prewar Business Cycle Reconsidered: New Estimates of Gross National Product, 1869-1908.
Traditional estimates of prewar gross national product (GNP) exaggerate the size of cycles because they are based on the assumption that GNP moves approximately one for one with commodity output...
A New Monthly Index of Industrial Production, 1884?1940
Miron, Jeffrey A., Romer, Christina D.
The article derives a new monthly index of industrial production for the United States for 1884 to 1940. This index improves upon existing measures of industrial production by excluding indirect...
What Ended the Great Depression?
This paper examines the role of aggregate-demand stimulus in ending the Great Depression. Plausible estimates of the effects of fiscal and monetary changes indicate that nearly all the observed...
This article evaluates the consistency of the NBER business cycle reference dates. It finds that the early reference dates are derived from detrended data, whereas the dates after 1927 are derived...
Why Did Prices Rise in the 1930s?
Prices rose in most years between 1933 and 1941 even though output was substantially below trend. This inflation cannot be explained as simply the effect of devaluation and changes in expectations....
Fiscal Policy and Economic Recovery
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is the biggest, boldest countercyclical fiscal stimulus in American history. What is its likely impact? Current econometric models indicate that a...
Lecciones de la Gran Depresión para la recuperación económica en 2009
This article compares the Great Depression of the thirties with the current global crisis and offers some useful lessons for designing policies to overcome the crisis and begin a strong recovery. One...