Social spending and automatic stabilizers in the OECD
通过分析21个OECD国家1982-2003年的数据，发现年龄相关和健康相关的社会支出以及伤残和疾病津贴都具有稳定经济周期的作用，挑战了宏观文献中仅关注税收和失业补偿的传统观点。
The macroeconomic literature on automatic stabilization tends to focus on taxes and dismiss the relevance of government expenditure except for unemployment compensation. Our results go sharply contrary to this view. We engage in an empirical analysis of 21 OECD countries from 1982 to 2003 and find that age- and health-related social expenditure as well as incapacity and sick benefits all react to the cycle in a stabilizing manner. While possibly new in the macro literature, this conforms to many results in studies in labour economics. The policy implications are broad since much previous analysis of discretionary fiscal policy rests on official figures for automatic stabilization. There are also major implications for efforts to incorporate automatic fiscal policy in simulation models.— Julia Darby and Jacques Melitz