We analyze the impact of fiscal and monetary stimulus in an economy with mortgage debt, where inflation redistributes from savers to borrowers. We show theoretically that fiscal transfers without future tax increases cause a surge in inflation, increasing consumption demand and house prices. The...

Do periods of persistently loose monetary policy increase financial fragility and the likelihood of a financial crisis? This is a central question for policymakers, yet the literature does not provide systematic empirical evidence about this link at the aggregate level. In this paper we fill...

I use the valuation equation of government debt to understand fiscal and monetary policy in and following the great recession of 2008-2009, to think about fiscal pressures on US inflation, and what sequence of events might surround such an inflation. I emphasize that a fiscal inflation can come...

The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Credit Crisis of the 2000s had similar causes but elicited strikingly different policy responses. It may still be too early to assess the effectiveness of current policy responses, but it is possible to analyze monetary and fiscal policies in the...

When monetary and fiscal policy are conducted as in the euro area, output, inflation, and government bond default premia are indeterminate according to a standard general equilibrium model with sticky prices extended to include defaultable public debt. With sunspots, the model mimics the recent...

Macroprudential policy holds the promise of becoming a powerful tool for preventing financial crises. Financial amplification in response to domestic shocks or global spillovers and pecuniary externalities caused by Fisherian collateral constraints provide a sound theoretical foundation for this...

We provide a comprehensive account of the dynamics of eurozone countries from 2000 to 2012. We analyze private leverage, fiscal policy, labor costs and interest rates and we propose a strategy to separate the impact of credit cycles, excessive government spending, and sudden stops. We then ask...

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...

This essay discusses the reasons for and implications of the decline in real interest rates around the world over the past several decades. It suggests that the decline in interest rates is largely explicable from trends in saving, growth, and markups. In this environment, greater government...