How does the output response to a change in government spending vary over the business cycle? What are the welfare effects of spending shocks? This paper studies the state-dependence of the output and welfare effects of shocks to government purchases in a DSGE model with real and nominal...

This article reviews macroeconomic models with heterogeneous households. A key question for the relevance of these models concerns the degree to which markets are complete. This is because the existence of complete markets imposes restrictions on (i) how much heterogeneity matters for aggregate...

This paper investigates the response of hours worked and real wages to fiscal policy shocks in the U.S. during the post World War II era. We identify these shocks with exogenous changes in military purchases and argue that they lead to a persistent increase in government purchases and tax rates...

The occupation payments made by France to Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944 represent one of the largest recorded international transfers and contributed significantly to financing the overall German war effort. Using a neoclassical growth model that incorporates essential features of the...

This paper investigates the nature of U.S. fiscal policy in the aftermath of 9/11. We argue that the recent dramatic fall in the government surplus and the large fall in tax rates cannot be accounted for by either the state of the U.S. economy as of 9/11 or as the typical response of fiscal...

This paper estimates regime-switching rules for monetary policy and tax policy over the post-war period in the United States and imposes the estimated policy process on a calibrated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities. Decision rules are locally unique and...

We analyze a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium (DSGE) model with an externality through climate change from using fossil energy. A central result of our paper is an analytical derivation of a simple formula for the marginal externality damage of emissions. This formula, which holds under...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market---rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities---led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

We do not have a good measure of the effects of fiscal policy in a recession because the methods that we use to estimate the effects of fiscal policy -- both those using the observed outcomes following different policies in aggregate data and those studying counterfactuals in fitted model...

How do capital income taxes affect household portfolio choice and growth? We" approach this question within the context of a stochastic model of a small open economy in" which taxes on income from domestic capital (equity) and foreign bonds affect household" portfolio choice, welfare and the...