This paper considers fiscal policy during the pandemic through the lens of optimal social insurance. We develop a simple framework to analyze how government taxes and transfers could mimic the insurance against pandemic income losses that people would like to have had. Permutations of the...

The narrative approach to macroeconomic identification uses qualitative sources, such as newspapers or government records, to provide information that can help establish causal relationships. This paper discusses the requirements for rigorous narrative analysis using fresh research on the impact...

Why do some attempts at disinflation lead to substantial reductions in inflation while others do not? We investigate this question in the context of the Federal Reserve's attempts at disinflation since World War II. Our central finding is that a fundamental determinant of success in reducing...

Changes in both the macroeconomy and in macroeconomics suggest that the IS-LM-AS model is no longer the best baseline model of short-run fluctuations for teaching and policy analysis. This paper presents an alternative model that replaces the assumption that the central bank targets the money...

Most empirical papers in economics focus on two aspects of their results: whether the estimates are statistically significantly different from zero and the interpretation of the point estimates. This focus obscures important information about the implications of the results for economically...

This paper uses play-by-play accounts of virtually all regular season National Football League games for 1998-2000 to analyze teams' choices on fourth down between trying for a first down and kicking. Dynamic programming is used to estimate the values of possessing the ball at different points...

A large recent literature shows that strategic interactions among actors with conflicting objectives can produce inefficient political decisions. This paper investigates an alternative explanation of such decisions: if individuals' errors in assessing the likely effects of proposed policies are...

This paper argues that an important part of movements in asset prices may be caused by neither external news nor irrationality, but the by revelation of information by the trading process itself. Two models are developed that illustrate this general idea. One model is based on investor...

This paper points out and tests a straight forward but previously unnoticed prediction of models in which the absence of precommitment in monetary policy leads to excessive inflation. Because unanticipated monetary expansion leads to real exchange rate depreciation, and because the harms of real...

The classic models of staggered adjustment of Taylor and Blanchard takes the frequency of price or wage adjustment as exogenous. This paper develops a model in which the frequency of price changes in endogenous. It then uses the model to analyze the effects of changes in the parameters of the...