Drawing on the original survey of Japanese firms during the COVID-19 pandemic, we estimate the impact of the crisis on firms’ sales, employment and hours worked per employee and roles of Work-from-Home (WfH) arrangements in mitigating negative effects. We find that the lowered mobility,...

In this paper, we characterize the relationship between the initial distribution of human capital and physical inheritances among individuals and the long-run distribution of these two variables. In a model with indivisible investment in education, we analyze how the initial distribution of...

In this study, we explain the driving forces behind the secular stagnation associated with a persistent decrease in interest rates. To do so, we employ a model that incorporates a crisis risk triggered by an accumulation of government debt. The model shows that the fear of large-scale taxation...

Episodes of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past fifty years. Since 2010, emerging and developing economies have experienced another wave of historically large and rapid debt accumulation. Similar past debt buildups have often ended in widespread...

In 2019, President Trump called on the U.S. Federal Reserve to cut interest rates to depreciate the U.S. dollar, which, according to the IMF, is overvalued by between 6 and 12 percent. This paper uses an intertemporal general equilibrium model to explore what would likely happen if the...

We estimate short- and long-run tax elasticities that capture the relationship between changes in national income and tax revenue. We show that the short-run tax elasticity changes according to the business cycle. We estimate a two state Markov-switching regression on a novel dataset of tax...

The fiscal position can affect fiscal multipliers through two channels. Through the Ricardian channel, households reduce consumption in anticipation of future fiscal adjustments when fiscal stimulus is implemented from a weak fiscal position. Through the interest rate channel, fiscal stimulus...

Productivity growth has flat-lined in most economies despite rapid advances in technology. Economists suggest competing explanations for this paradox. Some argue the current stagnation will persist given deep structural challenges, arguing that recent technological advances are no match for...

Previous studies argue that, based on the New Keynesian framework, a fiscal stimulus financed by money creation has a strong positive effect on output under a reasonable degree of nominal price rigidities. This paper investigates the effects of an implementation lag in a money-financed fiscal...

The paper contributes to the growing global VAR (GVAR) literature by showing how global and national shocks can be identified within a GVAR framework. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated in an application to the analysis of the interactions between public debt and real output...