The paper examines international issues that arise in the design and evaluation of macroeconomic policy rules. It begins with a theoretical investigation of the effects of fiscal and monetary policy in a two-country rational expectations model with staggered wage and price setting and with...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the theory of macroeconomic policy. We study the effect of various incentive constraints on the policy making process, such as lack of credibility, political opportunism, political ideology, and divided government. The survey is organized in three...

This paper analyzes the effects of monetary and fiscal policy shocks on the term structure of interest rates. The effects of temporary versus permanent, unanticipated versus anticipated, policy disturbances and the responses of long versus short, and real versus nominal, rates are contrasted....

While the established literature on central bank communication has traditionally dealt with communication of monetary policy messages to financial markets and the wider public, central bank communication on fiscal policy has so far received little attention. This paper empirically reviews the...

This paper uses two established DSGE models (QUEST III and Smets-Wouters) to assess the impact of fiscal spending cuts on output and, in particular, also on inflation in the euro area under alternative settings for monetary policy. We compare four different settings of constrained monetary...

The euro area has been experiencing a prolonged period of weak economic activity and very low inflation. This paper reviews models of business cycle stabilization with an eye to formulating lessons for policy in the euro area. According to standard models, after a large recessionary shock...

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

This paper studies optimal financial policy in a world where the financial sector can become excessively optimistic. I decompose the welfare effects of bank capital regulation to demonstrate the effects of exuberance and its interaction with incentive problems in banking. The optimal policy...

We study the incidence and severity of lower-bound episodes and the efficacy of three types of state-dependent policies—forward guidance about the future path of interest rates, large-scale asset purchases and spending-based fiscal stimulus—in ameliorating the adverse consequences stemming...