Taxation has several significant excess burdens, including enforcement costs, compliance costs, and deadweight losses. Most estimates find that raising a dollar of tax revenue costs much more than a dollar. Unfortunately, commonly used public finance textbooks do not integrate these costs into...

In this rejoinder, I address five issues raised by Eggertsson’s reply to my commentary. First, I argue that the pre-Depression gold standard, though not ideal, was not a barrier to a desirable reflation. I then offer an account of the 1937-38 recession that views it as a continuation of...

Gauti Eggertsson uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in arguing that the period 1933 to 1937 represented recovery from the Great Depression, by virtue of regime change between the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. He claims that the Hoover administration was defined by...