Countries with high debt loads are vulnerable to an adverse feedback loop in which doubts by lenders lead to higher sovereign interest rates which in turn make the debt problems more severe. We analyze the recent experience of advanced economies using both econometric methods and case studies...

ECB President Christine Lagarde and others have suggested that climate change creates risks for price stability and for the viability of counterparties to central bank interventions and therefore monetary policy should contribute to fighting climate change. However, pursuit of this new objective...

This paper demonstrates how a central bank might operationalize an expanded role inclusive of managing risks from environmental pollution. The analysis introduces the green interest rate (rg) which depends on temporal changes in the pollution intensity of output. This policy instrument...

There are two ways to eliminate this distortion toward successful fiscal restoration. One of them is to make the monetary authority more conservative than society in the sense that the price stability weight of monetary authority is higher than that of society. The other way of eliminating the...

The global economy has a chronic shortage of safe assets which lies behind many recent macroeconomic imbalances. This paper provides a simple model of the Safe Asset Mechanism (SAM), its recessionary safety traps, and its policy antidotes. Safety traps share many common features with...

Aging populations in advanced economies are placing ever-increasing demands on government spending in the form of old-age benefits. Economies that have promised substantially more benefits than they have made provision to finance are heading into a prolonged era of fiscal stress. Unresolved...