Suchergebnisse

This thesis examines the macroeconomic effects of Fiscal and Monetary Policy through the lens of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Models (DSGE) giving emphasis on the issue of the size of government consumption spending multipliers. The goal of any DSGE model is to explain the business cycle properties, the effects of fiscal and monetary policy and more generally perform forecasting and policy analysis of any economy. The starting point before building any DSGE model for a particular economy is to analyze the data (time series) of that economy. Therefore, in Chapter 1 I choose the Greek economy as a case study and by using real annual data for the period 1970-2007 I perform a business cycle analysis of the economy by presenting and comparing the statistical properties (first and second moment properties) of Greek business cycles with that of other developed economies or groups of developed economies mainly members of the Euro area. In addition, I examine the fiscal policy stance in Greece in the last decades. While the cyclical fluctuations of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) affect the fluctuations of many fiscal variables I focus my analysis on government consumption spending and on tax revenue. In Chapter 2, I examine the effects of fiscal and monetary policy and the size of government consumption spending multipliers in closed economy New Keynesian (NK) DSGE models by parameterizing and solving numerically a series of NK models starting from a benchmark simple model and gradually adding to it new characteristics. I show that even models of the same class of DSGE models, i.e., closed economy NK, can deliver different values of government consumption spending multipliers, depending on underlying model features, assumptions and parameter values, such as the type of the utility function reflecting households preferences over consumption and leisure, the degree of price rigidities, monetary policy reaction functions, the size of investment adjustment costs, distortionary vs lump sum taxation, proportion of Rule ...