Current Account and Budget Deficits: Twins or Distant Cousins?
构建了一个两国微观理论模型，检验李嘉图等价假说，发现增税偿债不影响经常账户，但政府支出增加会导致经常账户赤字；美国数据部分不支持该假说，但严格检验未能拒绝联邦预算与经常账户赤字独立的结论。
The paper develops a two-country micro-theoretic model consistent with the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis (REH). Specifically, tax increases used to retire government debt will not affect private spending or the current account balance. However, increases in government spending, regard- less of the means of finance, can be expected to induce a current account deficit. An unconstrained vector autoregres- sion shows some patterns in the recent U.S. data which appear to be inconsistent with the REH. Rigorous testing of the model, however, does not allow us to reject the indepen- dence of the record federal government budget and current account deficits.