Consumption, Saving, and Fiscal Policy
回顾了Blinder和Solow关于财政政策影响实际经济活动的经典研究，结合后续理论与实证进展，认为财政政策对短期稳定和长期资本积累仍然重要，但税收对消费的影响可能仅为传统凯恩斯估计的三分之一。
When this year's Nobel Laureate, Robert Solow, and Ely Lecturer, Alan Blinder, teamed their impressive talents several years ago to ask, Does Fiscal Policy Matter?, the answer they gave was a resounding yes. Working in a then sophisticated neo-Keynesian IS-LM tradition, Blinder and Solow presented a parsimonious macroeconomic model and some statistical and historical evidence suggesting that changes in the weighted standardized government surplus did indeed substantially affect real economic activity. The profession was pretty much convinced that the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) or life cycle hypothesis (LCH) almost provided a sufficient framework for analyzing consumption and saving and hence the effects of fiscal policy. Curiously, the large Keynesian effect of a tax-induced rise in current disposable income was reconciled with the very small effect predicted by the longerhorizon models with more of a whimper than a bang. Since then, the profession has moved some distance from complete acceptance of the life cycle and permanent income hypotheses and perhaps even further from the traditional consumption function specification in vogue at that time. Indeed, Robert Barro (1974) rekindled the notion that a tax-fordebt swap would have no real effects. An avalanche of analytical and empirical research has sharpened our understanding of the issues involved, the econometric difficulties in estimating the relevant parameters, and even the care necessary in defining what is meant when one asks whether fiscal policy has any real economic effects. Surprisingly, despite numerous caveats, new and' improved data and estimation techniques, and improved perspectives offered by analytical insights not yet prevalent when Blinder and Solow wrote their paper, my conclusion is that their answer is essentially correct: fiscal policy does matter, both for short-run stabilization purposes and for long-run capital accumulation. I believe the preponderance of the evidence strongly supports this view, although the empirical research suggests that the impact of, say, tax cuts on consumption is perhaps only one-third as large as the typical Keynesian estimate of two decades ago, but much larger than the neutrality predicted by Ricardian equivalence or the very small effect predicted by the PIH or LCH.