In 1790, a U.S. paper dollar was widely held in disrepute (something shoddy was not 'worth a Continental'). By 1879, a U.S. paper dollar had become 'as good as gold.' These outcomes emerged from how the U.S. federal government financed three wars: the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and...

A planner sets a lump sum transfer and a linear tax on labor income in an economy with incomplete markets, heterogeneous agents, and aggregate shocks. The planner's concerns about redistribution impart a welfare cost to fluctuating transfers. The distribution of net asset holdings across agents...

We infer determinants of Latin American hyperinflations and stabilizations by using the method of maximum likelihood to estimate a hidden Markov model that potentially assigns roles both to fundamentals in the form of government deficits that are financed by money creation and to destabilizing...

We use Bayesian methods to estimate two models of post WWII U.S. inflation rates with drifting stochastic volatility and drifting coefficients. One model is univariate, the other a multivariate autoregression. We define the inflation gap as the deviation of inflation from a pure random walk...

This paper describes a class of dynamic stochastic linear quadratic equilibrium models. A model is specified by naming lists of matrices that determine preferences, technology, and the information structure. Aggregate equilibrium allocations and prices are computed by solving a social planning...

We analyze the democratic politics of a rule that separates capital and ordinary account budgets and allows the government to issue debt to finance capital items only. Many national governments followed this rule in the 18th and 19th centuries and most U.S. states do today. This simple 1800s...

Congress first imposed an aggregate debt limit in 1939 when it delegated decisions about designing US debt instruments to the Treasury. Before World War I, Congress designed each bond and specified a maximum amount of each bond that the Treasury could issue. It usually specified purposes for...

The immediate effect of Friedman's 1968 AEA presidential address on the economics profession was the introduction of an adaptive term in the Phillips curve that shifted the curve, as Friedman proposed, based on expected inflation. Initial formulations suggested that the shift was less than...

A representative investor does not know which member of a set of well-defined parametric "structured models'' is best. The investor also suspects that all of the structured models are misspecified. These uncertainties about probability distributions of risks give rise to components of...

We use a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to estimate a model that allows temporary gaps between a true expectational Phillips curve and the monetary authority's approximating non-expectational Phillips curve. A dynamic programming problem implies that the monetary authority's...