Societies often rely on simple rules to restrict the size and behavior of governments. When fiscal and monetary policies are conducted by a discretionary and profligate government, I find that revenue ceilings vastly outperform debt, deficit and monetary rules, both in effectiveness at curbing...

Are monetary policy regimes state-dependent? To answer the question this paper estimates New Keynesian general equilibrium models that allow the state of the economy to influence the monetary authority's stance on inflation. I take advantage of recent developments in solving rational...

We study nominal GDP targeting as optimal monetary policy in a simple and stylized model with a credit market friction. The macroeconomy we study has considerable income inequality, which gives rise to a large private sector credit market. There is an important credit market friction because...

We show that the contemporaneous and longer horizon impulse responses estimated using small-scale Proxy structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) can be severely biased in the presence of information insufficiency. Instead, we recommend the use of a Proxy Factor Augmented VAR (FAVAR) model that...