Since the 1960s, the relative importance of monetary and fiscal policy in economic stabilization has been a matter of debate among monetarists and fiscalists. According to the monetarists’ view, monetary policy has had a more significant role than fiscal policy. On the other hand, the...

Sixteen countries across the world ¡ª including the United States and many European nations ¡ª have fallen into economic crises since the late 1990s. In <em>The Limits of Fiscal, Monetary, and Trade Policies: International Comparisons and Solutions</em>, Jonathan E Leightner convincingly argues that...

The seminal 1968 paper of Anderson and Jordan on the relative effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy on output stabilization caused many debates among both economists and policy makers. This paper uses a standard unrestricted VAR (vector autoregression) model to analyze the above...

The United States’ federal government subsidizes local public finance through grants. Given projected U.S. deficits, this may prove untenable. Further, a broader range of policy instruments may offer more effective support of local governments. Herein four policies are considered beginning...

This paper discusses the conditions under which currency unions would be desirable and viable. We discuss and present new empirical evidence concerning the operation of existing currency unions in federal states and among regional country groupings. In particular, we examine the traditional...

This paper offers a critique of the UK government's Medium Term Financial Strategy from a policy optimization perspective. It argues that recent versions of the MTFS can be interpreted as representing the outcome of a policy optimization exercise, but that certain key aspects remain unclear....

This survey essay considers how rational expectations have changed our evaluation of monetary policy. In the first section, various underpinnings of the "Phillips curve" relation between inflation and output are reviewed. All are concluded to be products of particular institutional set-ups whose...