Disagreement About Fiscal Policy
利用1960年以来德国联邦议会的全部演讲，通过自然语言处理构建政府与反对派之间以及联合政府内部关于财政政策的分歧指标，发现联合政府内部的分歧对工业生产、订单和股价有负面影响。
ABSTRACT Politicians disagree about fiscal policy. This disagreement should have economic effects beyond the effects of government spending and taxation. We use the full set of speeches in the German Bundestag since 1960 and apply state‐of‐the art natural language processing techniques to construct two series of fiscal disagreement starting in 1970: disagreement about fiscal policy between the government and the opposition and disagreement within the coalition government. Both series fluctuate strongly and peak in 1982/83, but are also notably different from each other. In a VAR analysis, we show that within‐coalition disagreement has adverse effects on real activity. Higher disagreement causes a drop in industrial production, manufacturing orders and stock prices. In contrast, government‐opposition disagreement does not affect the business cycle.