Recent proposals to expand the Child Tax Credit (CTC) are at the center of current policy discussions in the United States. We study the fiscal cost of three such proposals that would expand refundability of the credit to low-income children, increase the maximum credit amount, and/or eliminate...

This paper considers fiscal policy during the pandemic through the lens of optimal social insurance. We develop a simple framework to analyze how government taxes and transfers could mimic the insurance against pandemic income losses that people would like to have had. Permutations of the...

Our current inflation stemmed from a fiscal shock. The Fed is slow to react. Why? Will the Fed's slow reaction spur more inflation? I write a simple model that encompasses the Fed's mild projections and its slow reaction, and traditional views that inflation will surge without swift rate rises....

This paper proposes a tractable framework to analyze fiscal space and the dynamics of government debt, with a possibly binding zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint. Without the ZLB, a greater primary deficit unambiguously raises debt. However, debt need not explode: When R G - φ, where φ is the...

Brazil has had a long period of high inflation. It peaked around 100 percent per year in 1964, decreased until the first oil shock (1973), but accelerated again afterward, reaching levels above 100 percent on average between 1980 and 1994. This last period coincided with severe balance of...

After the economic reforms that followed the National Revolution of the 1950s, Bolivia seemed positioned for sustained growth. Indeed, it achieved unprecedented growth from 1960 to 1977. The rapid accumulation of debt due to persistent deficits and a fixed exchange rate policy during the 1970s...

This paper argues that the key deep underlying fundamental for the growing international imbalances leading to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system between 1971 and 1973 was rising U.S. inflation since 1965. It was driven in turn by expansionary fiscal and monetary policies--the elephant in...

We estimate a model in which fiscal and monetary policy behavior arise from the optimizing behavior of distinct policy authorities, with potentially different welfare functions. Optimal time-consistent policy behavior fits U.S. time series at least as well as rules-based behavior. American...

Using a large-scale survey of U.S. households during the Covid-19 pandemic, we study how new information about fiscal and monetary policy responses to the crisis affects households' expectations. We provide random subsets of participants in the Nielsen Homescan panel with different combinations...