"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...

"Considerable debate rages about whether Federal Reserve policy was too lax in the early part of the 2000s, thereby fueling the home-price bubble that was the proximate cause of the global financial crisis. We present evidence that the view that modest alterations to monetary policy have vast...