With integrated trade and financial markets, a collapse in aggregate demand in a large country can cause "natural real interest rates" to fall below zero in all countries, giving rise to a global "liquidity trap." This paper explores the optimal policy response to this type of shock, when...

The literature has argued that developing countries are unable to adopt counter-cyclical monetary and fiscal policies due to financial imperfections and unfavorable politicaleconomy conditions. Using a world sample of 115 industrial and developing countries for 1984-2008, we find that the level...

John Taylor and David Romer champion an approach to teaching undergraduate macroeconomics that dispenses with the LM half of the IS-LM model and replaces it with a rule for setting the interest rate as a function of inflation and the output gap - i.e., a Taylor rule. But the IS curve is...

When a small open economy experiences a sufficiently large negative export shock, it is vulnerable to falling into a zero bound trap. In addition, such a shock can have very large impact on the economy compared to the case when the zero bound is not a binding constraint. This could be one...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy rules in a monetary union. The focus of the analysis is on the interaction between the fiscal policy of member countries (regions) and the central monetary authority. When capital markets are integrated, the fiscal policy of one country will...

This paper examines the role of fiscal stabilization policy in a two-country framework that allows for a general degree of exchange rate pass-through. I derive analytical solutions for optimal monetary and fiscal policy which are shown to depend on the degree of pass-through. In the case of...