The world economy has experienced four global recessions over the past seven decades: in 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2009. During each of these episodes, annual real per capita global GDP contracted, and this contraction was accompanied by weakening of other key indicators of global economic activity....

The COVID-19 pandemic induced an increase in both the amount of time that households spend at home and the share of expenditures allocated to at-home consumption. These changes coincided with a period of rapidly rising house prices. We interpret these facts as the result of stay-at-home shocks...

We document that trust in public institutions - and particularly trust in banks, business and government - has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear...

A significant literature has documented trend increases in pain among Americans over the last two or three decades. There is no single explanation seeming to work well for the increase. We show that, rather than resulting from a smooth upward trend, the increase was almost entirely concentrated...

Our current inflation stemmed from a fiscal shock. The Fed is slow to react. Why? Will the Fed's slow reaction spur more inflation? I write a simple model that encompasses the Fed's mild projections and its slow reaction, and traditional views that inflation will surge without swift rate rises....

Fiscal support measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic varied in their targeted beneficiaries. Relying on variability across 10 large economies, we study differences in the inflationary effects of fiscal support measures targeting consumers or businesses. Because conventional measures of...

The fiscal theory states that inflation adjusts so that the real value of government debt equals the present value of real primary surpluses. Monetary policy remains important. The central bank can set an interest rate target, which determines the path of expected inflation, while news about the...

This paper proposes a theory of the fiscal foundations of inflation based on imperfect knowledge and learning. Because imperfect knowledge breaks Ricardian equivalence the scale and composition of the public debt matter for inflation. High moderate-duration debt generates wealth effects on...

This paper describes a fiscal database for Australia including measures of government spending, revenue, deficits, debt and various sub-aggregates as initially published and subsequently revised. The data vintages are collated from various sources and provide a comprehensive description of the...

We analyse if the adoption of a fiscal rule insulates the domestic economy from commodity price fluctuations in a resource-rich economy. To do so we develop a timevarying Dynamic Factor Model, in which both the volatility of structural shocks and the systematic fiscal policy responses are...