Debt management can be used at low interest rates to lower bond yields, to provide bank assets and thereby help maintain broad money growth, or to save on interest payments. The US example in the 1930s and the recent Japanese case suggest that this tool was not fully exploited in either case

A key issue in the renewal of the inflation-control agreement is the question of the appropriate level of the inflation target. Many observers have raised concerns that with the reduction in the neutral rate, and the experience of the recent financial crisis, the effective lower bound (ELB) is...

During and after the Great Recession of 2008-09, conventional monetary policy in the United States and many other advanced economies was constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Several central banks implemented large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs, more...

In a recent paper, Atkeson and Kehoe (2004) demonstrated the lack of a robust empirical relationship between inflation and growth for a cross-section of countries with 19th and 20th century data, concluding that the historical evidence only provides weak support for the contention that deflation...

This paper examines the implications of central bank independence for equilibrium macroeconomic performance. The focus is on institutional arrangements governing financial relationships between central banks and ministries of finance, in the presence of competing objectives and constraints...

Stock-bond correlation is considered an important input for multi-asset portfolio construction. While there has been much research on US stockbond correlation, less work has focused on stock-bond correlations in other countries, their relationship to each other, and their common macroeconomic...

This paper builds a model-based dynamic monetary and fiscal conditions index (DMFCI) and uses it to examine the evolution of the joint stance of monetary and fiscal policies in the euro area (EA) and in its three largest member countries over the period 2007-2018. The index is based on the...

The fiscal theory states that inflation adjusts so that the real value of government debt equals the present value of real primary surpluses. Monetary policy remains important. The central bank can set an interest rate target, which determines the path of expected inflation, while news about the...

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the Great Depression (1929-1933) and the Great Financial Crisis (2007-2009) by contrasting the crises' main driving forces and how they relate to each other with respect to the United States. To this end, causes, consequences and measures undertaken...

This paper examines the extent to which the evolution of monetary policy frameworks and actual policy decisions in the United States and Japan contributed to the differences in macroeconomic performance of the two countries in the 1980s and 1990s. It considers the extent to which monetary policy...