Dylan Matthews:
The Romney campaign says stimulus doesn’t work. Here are the studies they left out.:
The negative effect of the administration’s ‘stimulus’ policies has been documented in a number of empirical studies
write economists Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, John Taylor and Kevin Hassett in a paper released by the Romney campaign. But the paper only mentions two studies, and one of them, by Amir Sufi and Atif Mian, is about Cash for Clunkers, a tiny subprogram of the stimulus.
A more comprehensive analysis of the studies that have tried to assess the stimulus leads to a very different conclusion. Last summer, I found nine such studies, seven of which found that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) had promoted economic growth and reduced unemployment. A recent issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy has six more papers assessing the stimulus, all of which conclude that stimulus works…
