% WARNING: This file may contain UTF-8 (unicode) characters. % While non-8-bit characters are officially unsupported in BibTeX, you % can use them with the biber backend of biblatex % usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex} @techreport{NBERw16786, title = "The Effects of Tax Shocks on Output: Not So Large, But Not Small Either", author = "Perotti, Roberto", institution = "National Bureau of Economic Research", type = "Working Paper", series = "Working Paper Series", number = "16786", year = "2011", month = "February", doi = {10.3386/w16786}, URL = "http://www.nber.org/papers/w16786", abstract = {In a seminal contribution, Romer and Romer (2010) (RR henceforth) estimate GDP tax multipliers of up to -3 after 3 years. These results have been criticized as implausibly large. For instance, Favero and Giavazzi (2010) (FG henceforth) argue RR's specification cannot be interpreted as a proper (truncated) moving average representation of the output process. They show that when the system is estimated in its VAR form, or its correct truncated MA representation, a unit realization of the RR shock has much smaller effects on GDP than in RR, typically about - .5 percentage points of GDP. I argue that on theoretical grounds the discretionary component of taxation should be allowed to have different effects than the automatic response of tax revenues to macroeconomic variables; existing approaches, including FG's, that do not allow for this difference, exhibit impulse responses that are biased towards 0. I show that the correct impulse responses to a RR tax shock are about half-way between the large effects estimated by RR and the much smaller effects estimated by FG: typically, a one percentage point of GDP increase in taxes leads to a decline in GDP by about 1.5 percentage points after 3 years. I also create two new datasets of tax shocks, one based on receipts and the other on liabilities; in these datasets, I distinguish between different types of taxes (personal, corporate, indirect, and social security) and their subcomponents.}, }