This paper revisits the personal expenditure tax (PET), the most prominent version of a progressive consumption tax. The PET has a long intellectual tradition in economics, and the merits and demerits of this alternative to the personal income tax have been discussed at length. What has been...

Budget-neutral tax wedge reductions rank high in the policy agenda of several EMU member states. Using a New Keynesian DSGE model of a monetary union with a complex labour market structure and a comprehensive public sector, we evaluate the macroeconomic and welfare effects of reducing the firms'...

What happens when fiscal and/or monetary policy changes systematically? We construct a DSGE model in which agents have to estimate fiscal and monetary policy rules and assess how uncertainty surrounding the conduct of policymakers influences transition paths after policy changes. We find that...

We analyze an estimated stochastic general equilibrium model that replicates key macroeconomic and financial stylized facts during the Great Moderation of 1983-2007. Our model predicts a sizeable and volatile nominal term premium - comparable to recent reduced-form empirical estimates - with...

The large recession that followed the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 triggered unprecedented monetary policy easing around the world. Most central banks in advanced economies deployed new instruments to affect credit conditions and to provide liquidity on a large scale after short-term...

Using a nonlinear Bayesian likelihood approach that fully accounts for the lower bound on nominal interest rates, we analyze US post-crisis macroeconomic dynamics and provide reference parameter estimates. We find that despite the attention received in the literature, neither the inclusion of...

Survey data on inflation expectations show that: (i) private sector forecasts and central bank forecasts are not fully aligned and (ii) private sector forecasters disagree about inflation expectations. To reconcile these two facts we introduce dispersed information in a New Keynesian model,...

Yes, indeed; at least for macroeconomic policy interaction. We examine a Neo-Classical economy and provide the conditions for policy arrangements to successfully stabilize the economy when agents have either rational or adaptive expectations. For a contemporaneous-data monetary policy rule, the...

Structural VAR studies disagree with narrative accounts about the history of monetary policy disturbances. We investigate whether employing the narrative monetary shock account as a proxy variable in a VAR model aligns both shock series. We quantify the extent to which the disagreement still...

We show that if business cycles are driven by financial shocks, the interplay between the effective lower bound (ELB) and the costs of external financing can generate an additional supply-side channel, which causes a disconnect between inflation and output. In normal times, factor costs dominate...