The textbook optimal policy response to an increase in government debt is simple--monetary policy should actively target inflation, and fiscal policy should smooth taxes while ensuring debt sustainability. Such policy prescriptions presuppose an ability to commit. Without that ability, the...

We estimate a model in which fiscal and monetary policy behavior arise from the optimizing behavior of distinct policy authorities, with potentially different welfare functions. Optimal time-consistent policy behavior fits U.S. time series at least as well as rules-based behavior. American...

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...

We develop a rational expectations framework to study the consequences of alternative means to resolve the "unfunded liabilities'' problem---unsustainable exponential growth in federal Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending with no plan to finance it. Resolution requires specifying a...

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...

The paper presents the fiscal theory of the price level in a variety of models, including endowment economies with lump-sum taxes and production economies with proportional income taxes. We offer a microeconomic perspective on the fiscal theory by computing a Slutsky-Hicks decomposition of the...

This paper estimates regime-switching rules for monetary policy and tax policy over the post-war period in the United States and imposes the estimated policy process on a calibrated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities. Decision rules are locally unique and...

A growing body of evidence finds that policy reaction functions vary substantially over different periods in the United States. This paper explores how moving to an environment in which monetary and fiscal regimes evolve according to a Markov process can change the impacts of policy shocks. In...

We consider price level determination from the perspective of portfolio choice. Arbitrages among money balances, bonds, and investment goods determine their relative demands. Returns to real balance holdings (transactions services), the nominal interest rate, and after-tax returns to investment...