How do different levels of government debt affect the optimal conduct of monetary and fiscal policies? And what do these optimal policies imply for the evolution of government debt over time? To provide an answer, this paper studies a standard monetary policy model with nominal rigidities and...

We document the presence of sizable distributional effects from unexpected price level movements in the Euro Area (EA) using sectoral accounts and newly available data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. The EA as a whole is a net winner of unexpected price level increases, with...

We determine optimal discretionary monetary policy in a New Keynesian model when nominal interest rates are bounded below by zero. Nominal interest rates should be lowered faster in response to adverse shocks than in the case without bound. Such ‘pre-emptive easing’ is optimal because...