This paper examines how the scale and composition of public debt can affect economies that implement a combination of "passive" monetary policy and "active" fiscal policy. This policy configuration is argued to be of both historical and contemporary interest in the cases of the U.S. and Japanese...

New Keynesian theory identifies a set of principles central to the design and implementation of monetary policy. These principles rely on the ability of a central bank to manage expectations precisely, with policy prescriptions typically derived under the assumption of perfect information and...

Under rational expectations, monetary policy is generally highly effective in stabilizing the economy. Aggregate demand management operates through the expectations hypothesis of the term structure: Anticipated movements in future short-term interest rates control current demand. This paper...

This paper proposes a theory of the fiscal foundations of inflation based on imperfect knowledge and learning. The theory is similar in spirit to, but distinct from, unpleasant monetarist arithmetic and the fiscal theory of the price level. Because the assumption of imperfect knowledge breaks...

Economic theory predicts that intertemporal decisions depend critically on expectations about future outcomes. Using the universe of professional survey forecasts for the United States, we document the behavior of the entire term structure of expectations for output growth, inflation, and the...

Central bank communication plays an important role in shaping market participants’ expectations. This paper studies a simple nonlinear model of monetary policy in which agents have incomplete information about the economic environment. It shows that agents’ learning and the dynamics of the...

This paper analyzes how the formation of expectations constrains monetary and fiscal policy design. Economic agents have imperfect knowledge about the economic environment and the policy regime in place. Households and firms learn about the policy regime using historical data. Regime uncertainty...

The Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) was introduced by the Federal Reserve to promote liquidity in the financing markets for Treasury and other collateral. We evaluate one aspect of the program — the extent to which it has narrowed repo spreads between Treasury collateral and less...

We examine the relationship between monetary policy operations and interbank borrowing and lending of funds using sovereign bonds as collateral. We first establish that, in the precrisis period, there are important but rather weak relations between these funding sources and that this...

Standard real business cycle models must rely on total factor productivity (TFP) shocks to explain the observed comovement of consumption, investment, and hours worked. This paper shows that a neoclassical model consistent with observed heterogeneity in labor supply and consumption can generate...