This paper formalizes and quantifies the secular stagnation hypothesis, defined as a persistently low or negative natural rate of interest leading to a chronically binding zero lower bound (ZLB). Output-inflation dynamics and policy prescriptions are fundamentally different from those in the...

Generational policy is a fundamental aspect of a nation's fiscal affairs. The policy involves redistributing resources across generations and allocating to particular generations the burden of paying the government's bills. This chapter of the second edition of The Handbook of Public Economics...

In a static setup, migration of unskilled labor may be resisted by the entire native-born population because, being relatively low earners, migrants are net beneficiaries of the fiscal system. However, the paper shows that with a pay-as-you-go pension, an important pillar of the welfare state,...

The 2015 Paris Accord is meant to control our planet's rising temperature. But it may be doing the opposite in gradually, rather than immediately reducing CO2 emissions. The Accord effectively tells dirty-energy producers to "use it or lose it." This may be accelerating their extraction and...

This paper uses a New Keynesian model with banks and deposits to study the macroeconomic effects of policies that pay interest on reserves. While their effects on output and inflation are small, these policies require major adjustments in the way that the monetary authority manages the supply of...

Macroeconomists have largely converged on method, model design, reduced-form shocks, and principles of policy advice. Our main disagreements today are about implementing the methodology. Some think New Keynesian models are ready to be used for quarter-to-quarter quantitative policy advice; we do...

This paper reviews the recent literature on monetary policy rules. We exploit the monetary policy design problem within a simple baseline theoretical framework. We then consider the implications of adding various real world complications. Among other things, we show that the optimal policy...

In a standard open-economy New Keynesian model, the effective lower bound causes anomalies: output and terms of trade respond to a supply shock in the opposite direction compared to normal times. We introduce a tractable framework to accommodate for unconventional monetary policy. In our model,...

This paper presents a framework for analyzing how bounded rationality affects monetary and fiscal policy. The model is a tractable and parsimonious enrichment of the widely-used New Keynesian model – with one main new “cognitive discounting” parameter, which quantifies how poorly agents...

We propose a novel method to estimate dynamic equilibrium models with stochastic volatility. First, we characterize the properties of the solution to this class of models. Second, we take advantage of the results about the structure of the solution to build a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm to...