The fall in the U.S. public debt/GDP ratio from 106% in 1946 to 23% in 1974 is often attributed to high rates of economic growth. This paper examines the roles of three other factors: primary budget surpluses, surprise inflation, and pegged interest rates before the Fed-Treasury Accord of 1951....

The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggretion of the CPI over 1990-2021, and...

This paper analyzes the dramatic rise in U.S. inflation since 2020, which we decompose into a rise in core inflation as measured by the weighted median inflation rate and deviations of headline inflation from core. We explain the rise in core with two factors, the tightening of the labor market...

This paper examines the distributional effects of fiscal consolidation. Using episodes of fiscal consolidation for a sample of 17 OECD countries over the period 1978-2009, we find that fiscal consolidation has typically had significant distributional effects by raising inequality, decreasing...