财政刺激计划和家庭预期

Fiscalstimulus plans andhouseholds’ expectations by Fiorella De Fiore, Marco Jacopo Lombardi and AlbertPierres Tejada Monetary and Economic Department December 2024 JEL classification: E30, E40, E50, E70.Keywords: Inflation expectations, fiscal policy, stimulusplans, households. BISWorking Papers are written by members of the Monetary and EconomicDepartment of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by othereconomists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topicalinterest and are technical in character. The views expressed in them are those of theirauthors and not necessarily the views of the BIS. This publication is available on the BIS website (www.bis.org). ©Bank for International Settlements 2024. All rights reserved. Brief excerpts may bereproduced or translated provided the source is stated. Fiscal stimulus plans and households’ expectations∗ Fiorella De Fiore†Marco J. Lombardi‡Albert Pierres Tejada§December 9, 2024 Abstract Fiscal decisions develop through multiple stages of political discussions and lengthylegislative processes.We propose a measure of public attention to fiscal policy newsbased on Google Trends and investigate the reaction of households’ expectations whenattention is highest.We focus on three large U.S. fiscal stimulus plans: the CARESAct, the American Rescue Plan, and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. We find that atten-tion peaks when the plan is approved by Congress or signed by the President. On thosedates, financially literate households significantly adjust their expectations: those ofinflation and earnings increase, while those of unemployment decline. Keywords:inflation expectations, fiscal policy, stimulus plans, householdsJEL Codes:E30, E40, E50, E70 1Introduction In advanced economies, government expenditure amounts on average to roughly 50% of GDPand is therefore a key contributor to macroeconomic developments.Fiscal policy affectsthe economy directly through the impact of taxes and subsidies on households’ and firms’finances but also indirectly through its impact on agents’ expectations about the dynamicsof prices and economic activity.When a fiscal stimulus package is announced, householdscan become more optimistic about the macroeconomic prospects, boost their consumptionand hence generate inflation; by a similar token, they may become pessimistic about futurefiscal solvency – particularly if the debt level is already high – and reduce consumption ongrounds of higher expected future taxes. The effects of news about fiscal policy on agents’ expectations clearly depend on the extentto which certain fiscal decisions are already factored into their information sets. Similarly towhat happens with monetary policy, an analysis of the impact of fiscal policy announcementson expectations requires isolating the surprises relative to the systematic component. The literature on the effects of fiscal policy on expectations is less extensive compared tothat on the impact of monetary policy. One key reason is the inherent difficulty in identifyingfiscal surprises and placing them at a specific point in time. In contrast to monetary policydecisions, which are taken in closed-door meetings and announced at a specific date, fiscaldecisions develop over time through the multiple stages of discussions that are part of thepolitical process.This problem especially hampers studies aimed at assessing the impactof fiscal shocks on agents’ expectations, as these are typically built around a comparison ofexpectations elicited before and after a given announcement. While one can make the casethat professionals closely follow all the steps of the fiscal decision-making process, so thatany news prompts them to revise their expectations, it is harder to argue along the samelines for households. Some fiscal packages receive less media coverage than others, and theintensity of households’ attention varies over time as the package is designed and its approvaland implementation progresses. We study the effects of large fiscal stimulus packages on households’ expectations – mostimportantly those about inflation – using a novel approach based on a measure of publicattention towards fiscal matters constructed using Google Trends indices. More specifically,we identify moments in which the public attention towards the development and deploymentof a fiscal stimulus plan is higher by selecting the days at which that measure peaks.Wethen rely on U.S. data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations, collected on the daysaround those peaks, to test the effects of the fiscal package on households’ expectations. Our analysis focuses on three large U.S. fiscal stimulus packages of a broadly similar sizebut widely different in scope.We start by looking at the fiscal support package deployedas an emergency measure during the outburst of the Covid-19 pandemic: the CoronavirusAid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act, of 2020. We thenconsid