The Missing Intercept: A Demand Equivalence Approach
研究了在一般均衡中私人支出变化如何像财政支出变化一样被吸纳，利用财政乘数的时间序列证据来恢复私人支出冲击的“缺失截距”，并用2008年退税数据说明该方法的实用性。
I give conditions under which changes in private spending are accommodated in general equilibrium exactly like changes in aggregate fiscal expenditure. Under such demand equivalence, researchers can use time series evidence on fiscal multipliers to recover the general equilibrium “missing intercept” of shocks to private spending identified in the cross section. Through the lens of this theory, time series estimates of a fiscal multiplier around one suggest a missing intercept close to zero—an observation that I illustrate with an application to the 2008 tax rebates. I also discuss the robustness of this aggregation approach to plausible violations of demand equivalence.