A number of prominent economists and policymakers have argued that money-financed fiscal programs (helicopter drops) could be efficacious in boosting output and inflation in economies facing persistent economic weakness, very low inflation, and significant fiscal strains. We employ a...

We explore the use of external instrument SVAR to identify monetary policy shocks. We identify a forward guidance shock as the monetary shock component having zero instant impact on the policy rate. A contractionary forward guidance shock raises both future output and price level, stressing the...

What is the policy uncertainty surrounding expiring taxes? How uncertain are the approvals of routine extensions of temporary tax policies? To answer these questions, I use event studies to measure cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) for firms that claimed the U.S. research and development (R&D)...

We investigate how liquidity regulations affect banks by examining a dormant monetary policy tool that functions as a liquidity regulation. Our identification strategy uses a regression kink design that relies on the variation in a marginal high-quality liquid asset (HQLA) requirement around an...

We study whether it is better to enforce the zero lower bound (ZLB) in models of U.S. Treasury yields using a shadow rate model or a quadratic term structure model. We show that the models achieve a similar in-sample fit and perform comparably in matching conditional expectations of future...

When choosing a strategy for monetary policy, policymakers must grapple with mismeasurement of labor market slack, and of the responsiveness of price inflation to that slack. Using stochastic simulations of a small-scale version of the Federal Reserve Board’s principal New Keynesian...

We produce business cycle chronologies for U.S. states and evaluate the factors that change the probability of moving from one phase to another. We find strong evidence for positive duration dependence in all business cycle phases but find that the effect is modest relative to other state- and...