This paper uses news reports about two deficit-reduction laws of the past decade to identify days when expected fiscal policy clearly became more or less expansionary. The paper also proposes a technique for identifying whether the real interest rate increased or decreased on those days, based...

This paper surveys the literature on the macroeconomic effects of government debt. It begins by discussing the data on debt and deficits, including the historical time series, measurement issues, and projections of future fiscal policy. The paper then presents the conventional theory of...

It is well known that the implicit insurance provided by labor income taxes can reduce total saving. We show that this insurance can change the composition of saving as well, because the reduction in labor-income risk may affect the amount of financial risk that an individual chooses to bear....

A simple stochastic equilibrium structure is used to study the implications of monetary and fiscal policy interactions for government intertemporal budget balance. Existence and uniqueness of monetary equilibria are shown to depend on parameters of policy rules. The paper derives closed form...

According to conventional wisdom, if deficits are inflationary then current deficits should predict subsequent movements in money growth. This paper USES a general equilibrium model fit to data to: (1) explore the policy behavior underlying this accepted viewpoint; (2) examine alternative...

While popular wisdom holds that the United States should save more now in anticipation of the aging of the baby boom generation, the optimal response to population aging from a macroeconomic perspective is not clear-cut. Indeed, Cutler, Poterba, Sheiner, and Summers ("CPSS",1990) argued that the...