Stimulating the Macro Economy Through State and Local Governments
分析了1977年美国通过三种拨款项目（无条件收入分享、公共服务就业、地方公共工程）刺激经济的间接反周期政策，发现只有公共服务就业拨款有短期微弱效果，且效果短暂，表明通过州和地方政府刺激经济并非良策。
The economic stimulus program of early 1977 featured a strong dose of what might be termed indirect countercyclical policy. Rather than altering federal expenditures and taxes directly, the stimulus program consisted mainly of three different grant programs for state and local governments: a) countercyclical revenue sharing (CRS); b) public service employment (PSE); c) local public works (LPW). In the parlance of the public finance literature, the first of these grants was an unconditional block grant, the second was a close-ended categorical grant with no local matching for the purpose of stimulating local government employment, and the third was a close-ended categorical grant with no local matching for the purpose of stimulating local government construction. Stimulating, or attempting to stimulate, aggregate spending through state and local governments in this way is fiscal federalism with a vengeance. The federal government is not abdicating its stabilization responsibilities and leaving it up to states and localities to do the job,' but it is placing its own stabilization policy at the mercy of the behavior of state and local governments. There are no restrictions at all on the use of the CRS grantsthey can be spent, used for tax reduction, or used to rebuild financial net worth (asset stocks less outstanding debt), with only the first two uses having any stimulative effect at all. There are restrictions on what can be done with the other two grants, but the well-known displacement phenomenon implies that with these grants it also may be possible for states and localities to frustrate the restrictions and use the grants as they would any other source of revenue sharing. What happens to all three grants then is an empirical issue, and the timing and magnitude of any stabilization impact depends on how the numbers come out. In this paper I briefly describe a model for estimating this stabilization impact and show what it suggests for the three grants. Only the PSE grant will be seen to have any positive short-run impact on aggregate spending at all, and that impact will prove to be both diluted and short-lived, indicating that the general idea of stimulating the economy through state and local governments is probably not a very good one. Plain old permanent federal income tax cuts retain their superiority as a fiscal stabilization device. But even though as stimulation devices the three grant programs leave much to be desired, as policies they may still be valuable, and the paper also suggests how one might do a more complete evaluation of each of the grant programs.