, and numerous participants in seminars for helpful comments. Thomas Stark of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia generously provided unpublished forecasts. Ben Backes and Chris Nekarda provided outstanding research assistance. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from National Science Foundation grant SES-0617219 through the NBER. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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We investigate whether U.S. government spending multipliers are higher during periods of economic slack or when interest rates are near the zero lower bound. Using new quarterly historical U.S. data covering multiple large wars and deep recessions, we estimate multipliers that are below unity irrespective of the amount of slack in the economy.These results are robust to two leading identification schemes, two different estimation methodologies, and many alternative specifications. In contrast, the results are more mixed for the zero lower bound state, with a few specifications implying multipliers as high as 1.5.We are grateful to Harald Uhlig, Roy Allen, Alan Auerbach, Graham Elliott, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Jim Hamilton, Òscar Jordà, Michael Owyang, Carolin Pflueger, Garey Ramey, Tatevik Sekhposyan, Mark Watson, Johannes Wieland, anonymous referees, and participants at many conferences and seminars for very helpful suggestions. We thank Michelle Ramey for excellent research assistance.

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