I analyze the effects of a money-financed fiscal stimulus and compare them with those resulting from a conventional debt-financed stimulus. I study the effects of both a tax cut and an increase in government purchases, with and without a binding zero lower bound (ZLB) on the nominal interest...

We define the notion of a 'de facto fiscal space' of a country as the inverse of the tax-years it would take to repay the public debt. Specifically, we measure the outstanding public debt relative to the de facto tax base, where the latter measures the realized tax collection, averaged across...

We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy at the zero lower bound. We first estimate a Markov-switching VAR to highlight that a zero-lower-bound regime captures most of the comovements during the Great...

We study the effects of debt-financed fiscal transfers in a general equilibrium, heterogeneous-agent model of the world economy. In the long run, increases in government debt anywhere raise the world interest rate and increase private wealth everywhere. In the short run, a country with a...

We develop a new class of general equilibrium models with partially unfunded debt to propose a fiscal theory of trend inflation. In response to business cycle shocks, the monetary authority controls inflation, and the fiscal authority stabilizes debt. However, the central bank accommodates...

Even allowing for substantial uncertainty regarding projections, current US fiscal policies are almost certainly unsustainable. Therefore, policymakers must decide when and in what ways to change policies. Changing policies sooner rather than later would put debt on a lower trajectory and...

The Great Recession and the Global Financial Crisis have left many developed countries with low interest rates and high levels of public debt, thus limiting the ability of policymakers to fight the next recession. Whether new fiscal stimulus programs would be jeopardized by these already heavy...

We study equilibria in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-market economy with nominal government debt and flexible prices. Unlike in representative agent economies, steady-state equilibria exist when the government runs persistent deficits, provided that the level of deficits is not too large. In...

The global financial crisis has permanently lowered the path of GDP in all advanced economies. At the same time, and in response to rising government debt levels, many of these countries have been engaging in fiscal consolidations that have had a negative impact on growth rates. We empirically...

We contribute to the debate on the macroeconomic effects of fiscal stimuli by showing that the impact of government expenditure shocks depends crucially on key country characteristics, such as the level of development, exchange rate regime, openness to trade, and public indebtedness. Based on a...