Abstract
•U.S. government consumption and government investment multipliers are the same.•Government spending multipliers do not depend on the state of the economy.•A $1 increase in real government spending increases real GDP by about $0.50.
This paper empirically studies the U.S. multiplier effects of government investment, government consumption and total government purchases on output. We explore dependencies of the multipliers on states of the economy, measured in different ways. Using local projections with instrumental variables, we find that a model without state-dependencies and using total government spending (instead of its components) provides the best fit to post-WWII data. These results are robust to various alternative specifications. We account for the COVID-19 period with a pandemic stringency index and for monetary policy shocks with a shadow interest rate. The government spending multiplier is approximately 0.5.