Identifying fiscal policy (in)effectiveness from the differential counter‐cyclicality of government spending in the interwar period
研究了20世纪20年代和30年代20个国家的政府支出反应函数，发现30年代政府支出的反周期程度低于20年代，且支出增长对产出增长无显著影响，表明财政政策在两次世界大战期间未发挥稳定作用。
Abstract Differences across decades in the counter‐cyclical stance of fiscal policy can identify whether the growth in government spending affects output growth and so speeds recovery from a recession. We study government‐spending reaction functions from the 1920s and 1930s for twenty countries. There are two main findings. First, surprisingly, government spending was less counter‐cyclical in the 1930s than in the 1920s. Second, the growth of government spending did not have a significant effect on output growth, so that there is little evidence that this feature of fiscal policy played a stabilizing role in the interwar period.