In this paper we estimate the effect of government consumption shocks on GDP using a panel of 21 developing economies. Our goal is to better understand the reasons for the low fiscal multipliers found in the literature by performing estimations for alternative exchange rate regimes,...

This paper has two main objectives. The first is to propose a policy architecture that can prevent a very high public debt from resulting in a high tax burden, a government default, or inflation. The second objective is to show that government deficits do not face a financing problem. After...

Historically high levels of private and public debt coupled with already very low short-term interest rates appear to limit the options for stimulative monetary policy in many advanced economies today. One option that has not yet been considered is monetary financing by central banks to boost...

I study the role of fiscal policy in the monetary transmission mechanism. I present a novel decomposition of the equilibrium that links the wealth effect, i.e. the revaluation of households' financial and human wealth, to the fiscal response to monetary policy. When monetary policy has fiscal...

The recent financial and economic crisis has triggered bold and diverse policy responses to prevent further, sharper and prolonged adverse effects to the financial and the real sector. The measures for alleviating the cycle were a feature both of the advanced and the emerging and developing...

The 1951 Treasury - Federal Reserve Accord is an important milestone in central bank history. It led to a lasting separation between monetary policy and the Treasury's debt-management powers, and established an independent central bank focused on price stability and macroeconomic stability. This...

We present strong empirical evidence favoring the role of effective demand in the US economy, in the spirit of Keynes and Kalecki. Our inference comes from a statistically well-specified VAR model constructed on a quarterly basis from 1980 to 2008. US output is our variable of interest, and it...

Not since the Great Depression have monetary policy matters and institutions weighed so heavily in commercial, financial, and political arenas. Apart from the eurozone crisis and global monetary policy issues, for nearly two years all else has counted for little more than noise on a relative...

Beyond its original mission to 'furnish an elastic currency' as lender of last resort and manager of the payments system, the Federal Reserve has always been responsible (along with the Treasury) for regulating and supervising member banks. After World War II, Congress directed the Fed to pursue...

The debate about the use of fiscal instruments for macroeconomic stabilization has regained prominence in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and the experience of a monetary union equipped with fiscal shock absorbers, such as the United States, has often been a reference. This paper enhances...