Recent experience with interest rates hitting the effective lower bound and agents facing binding borrowing constraints has emphasised the importance of understanding the behaviour of an economy in which some variables may be restricted at times. The extended path algorithm is a commonly used...

Automatic stabilisers are fiscal policy's first line of defence in the face of adverse economic shocks. Automatic stabilisers capture fiscal policy's automatic countercyclical response to the state of the business cycle, and are determined by factors like the progressivity of the tax system, the...

Fiscal multipliers provide a way of quantifying the GDP gain for a given (discretionary) fiscal policy intervention. I compute government consumption multipliers for New Zealand, in normal times and when monetary policy is constrained at the effective lower bound, using an estimated...