We study how the maturity structure of nominal government debt affects optimal monetary and fiscal policy decisions and equilibrium outcomes in the presence of distortionary taxes and sticky prices. Key findings are: (1) there is always a role for current and future inflation innovations to...

We develop the theory of price-level determination in a range of models using both ad hoc policy rules and jointly optimal monetary and fiscal policies and discuss empirical issues that arise when trying to identify monetary-fiscal regime. The article concludes with directions in which...

An asset-pricing perspective on inflation reveals that it depends on current and expected monetary and fiscal policies. There are three ways to carry $1 today into the future: money, bonds, and real assets. That dollar's purchasing power varies inversely with the price level. Expected money...

Many advanced economies are heading into an era of fiscal stress: populations are aging and governments have made substantially more promises of old-age benefits than they have made provisions to finance. This paper models the era of fiscal stress as stemming from relentlessly growing promised...

We use a rational expectations framework to assess the implications of rising debt in an environment with a "fiscal limit." The fiscal limit is defined as the point where the government no longer has the ability to finance higher debt levels by increasing taxes, so either an adjustment to fiscal...

A relation between inflation and the path of average marginal cost (often measured by unit labor cost) implied by the Calvo (1983) model of staggered pricing --- sometimes referred to as the "new-Keynesian Phillips curve"--- has been the subject of extensive econometric estimation and testing....

This paper reconsiders the Phelps-Lucas hypothesis, according to which temporary real effects of purely nominal disturbances result from imperfect information, but departs from the assumptions of Lucas (1973) in two crucial respects. Due to monopolistically competitive pricing, higher-order...

This paper considers a simple quantitative model of output, interest rate and inflation determination in the United States, and uses it to evaluate alternative rules by which the Fed may set interest rates. The model is derived from optimizing behavior under rational expectations, both on the...

This paper shows that it is possible to analyze equilibrium inflation determination without any reference to either money supply or demand, as long as one specifies policy in terms of a Wicksellian' interest-rate feedback rule. This approach should be of considerable interest, as central banks...

Proposals for 'inflation targeting' as a strategy for monetary policy leave open the important operational question of how to determine whether current policies are consistent with the long-run inflation target. An interesting possibility is that the central bank might target current...