Christophe Kamps

New Estimates of Government Net Capital Stocks for 22 OECD Countries 1960-2001

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet empirical analyses of public capital productivity have generally been limited to the official capital stock estimates available in a small sample of countries. Alternatively, many researchers have investigated the output effects of public investment - recognizing that investment may be a poor proxy for the corresponding capital stock. This paper attempts to overcome the data shortage by providing internationally comparable capital stock estimates for 22 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

The analytics of SVARs: a unified framework to measure fiscal multipliers

Do tax cuts and spending increases stimulate output? Studies that identify fiscal shocks using structural vector autoregressions (SVAR) have reached different conclusions. In this article, we show analytically that this lack of consensus reflects different assumptions on the fiscal rules that—by relating tax and spending policies to macroeconomic conditions—determine the identification of fiscal shocks and the associated fiscal multipliers. We then propose a new identification strategy based on a proxy SVAR that uses non-fiscal instruments to directly estimate the parameters of the fiscal rules. We find that spending increases stimulate output more than tax cuts..

Monetary Policy Rules and Oil Price Shocks

This paper studies the relative performance of alternative monetary policy rules in the presence of oil price shocks in a small open economy optimizing model. Our analysis shows that it is important to distinguish between alternative price indices (CPI, core CPI, and GDP deflator) when modeling the effects of oil price increases. This distinction has important implications for monetary policy as the central bank has to decide which inflation rate to target. Our results demonstrate that targeting the change in the GDP deflator is an inferior monetary policy strategy in the presence of oil price shocks.

Geldpolitik und vorausschauende Taylor-Regeln

This paper uses the empirical framework for estimating forward looking monetary policy rules developed in Clarida, Galí and Gertler (1998, 2000) to study monetary policy in Germany in the period 1991 to 1998. The estimation results show that the Bundesbank stabilized both inflation and the output gap in the 1990s. The money aggregate M3 influenced the behavior of the German central bank through its property as a leading indicator for future inflation. Schlagworte: Geldpolitik, Taylor-Regel, Deutsche Bundesbank JEL Klassifikation: E58 Christophe Kamps Christian Pierdzioch Institut für Weltwirtschaft Institut für Weltwirtschaft 24100 Kiel 24100 Kiel Telefon: 0431/8814-266 Telefon: 0431/8814-269 Telefax: 0431/8814-525 Telefax: 0431/8814-525 E-mail: kamps@ifw.uni-kiel.de E-mail: c.pierdzioch@ifw.uni-kiel.de ∗ Wir danken Alfred Boss, Jörg Döpke, Joachim Scheide und Hubert Strauß für hilfreiche Anmerkungen. Verbliebene Mängel gehen zu Lasten der Verfasser.

The Analytics of SVARs: A Unified Framework to Measure Fiscal Multipliers

Do tax cuts and spending increases stimulate output? Studies that identify fiscal shocks using structural vector autoregressions (SVAR) have reached different conclusions. In this article, we show analytically that this lack of consensus reflects different assumptions on the fiscal rules that—by relating tax and spending policies to macroeconomic conditions—determine the identification of fiscal shocks and the associated fiscal multipliers. We then propose a new identification strategy based on a proxy SVAR that uses non-fiscal instruments to directly estimate the parameters of the fiscal rules. We find that spending increases stimulate output more than tax cuts..