Aging populations in advanced economies are placing ever-increasing demands on government spending in the form of old-age benefits. Economies that have promised substantially more benefits than they have made provision to finance are heading into a prolonged era of fiscal stress. Unresolved...

Monetary policy decisions tend to be based on systematic analysis of alternative policy choices and their associated macroeconomic impacts: this is science. Fiscal policy choices, in contrast, spring from unsystematic speculation, grounded more in politics than economics: this is alchemy. In...

Changes in fiscal policy typically entail two kinds of lags: the legislative lag--between when legislation is proposed and when it is signed into law--and the implementation lag--from when a new fiscal law is enacted and when it takes effect. These lags imply that substantial time evolves...

Bayesian prior predictive analysis of five nested DSGE models suggests that model specifications and prior distributions tightly circumscribe the range of possible government spending multipliers. Multipliers are decomposed into wealth and substitution effects, yielding uniform comparisons...

Most economists would agree that a hike in the federal funds rate will cause some slowdown in growth and inflation, and that the bulk of the empirical evidence is consistent with this statement. But perfectly reasonable economists can and do disagree even on the basic effects of a shock to...

Every economy faces a "fiscal limit" that delivers the maximum government debt-GDP ratio that can be sustained without appreciable risk of default or higher inflation. But governments in advanced economies issue substantial nominal debt and nominal debt is a commitment to repay in nominal units....

We study how the maturity structure of nominal government debt affects optimal monetary and fiscal policy decisions and equilibrium outcomes in the presence of distortionary taxes and sticky prices. Key findings are: (1) there is always a role for current and future inflation innovations to...

We develop the theory of price-level determination in a range of models using both ad hoc policy rules and jointly optimal monetary and fiscal policies and discuss empirical issues that arise when trying to identify monetary-fiscal regime. The article concludes with directions in which...

In this lecture, I argue that there are remarkable parallels between how monetary and fiscal policies operate on the macro economy and that these parallels are sufficient to lead us to think about transforming fiscal policy and fiscal institutions as many countries have transformed monetary...

Slow moving demographics are aging populations around the world and pushing many countries into an extended period of heightened fiscal stress. In some countries, taxes alone cannot or likely will not fully fund projected pension and health care expenditures. If economic agents place sufficient...