Louise Sheiner

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Louise Sheiner is the Robert S. Kerr Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and policy director for the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. She previously served as a senior economist in the Fiscal Analysis Section of the Research and Statistics Division at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In her time at the Fed, she was also appointed deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and served as senior staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers. Before joining the Fed, Sheiner was an economist at the Joint Committee on Taxation. Sheiner pursues research on health spending, fiscal policy, and macroeconomics. She received her undergraduate degree in biology and her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

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Ten Senate Republicans recently proposed a $618-billion COVID relief package. In this piece, we provide an analysis of that package and update our analysis of the Biden Administration’s $1.9 trillion fiscal package, using the current-law GDP projections that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released on Monday.

In this piece, Wendy Edelberg and Louise Sheiner project the effect of the Biden package on GDP. They project that if the Biden package were enacted, GDP would reach the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) pre-pandemic GDP projection after the third quarter of 2021, exceeding it by 1 percent in the fourth quarter. In the middle of 2022, GDP would show a temporary and shallow decline and then grow at an annual rate of about 1.5 percent, coming close to the path projected just before the pandemic.

This analysis shows the effects on economic activity, as measured by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), of illustrative versions of several policies. Specifically, researchers examine five policies: a second round of checks to households, a resumption of enhanced unemployment insurance benefits, aid to state and local governments, support for small businesses, and other forms of fiscal support.

Slowdowns in the economy are inevitable. While it may be tempting to rely on Federal Reserve policy as a lone response to recessions, this would be a mistake; we know that fiscal stimulus is effective. Rather than wait for a crisis to strike before designing discretionary fiscal policy, we would be better served by preparing in advance. Enacting evidence-based automatic stabilizer proposals before the next recession will help the next recovery start faster, make job creation stronger, and restore confidence to businesses and households.

Louise Sheiner and Michael Ng investigate the cyclicality of fiscal policy over the past 40 years, finding that fiscal policy has been increasingly countercyclical, with automatic stabilizers providing roughly half the stabilization. By contrast, state fiscal policy has been mildly procyclical.

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