We review the role of the central bank's (CB) balance sheet in a textbook monetary model, and explore what changes if the central bank is allowed to pay interest on its liabilities. When the central bank cannot pay interest, away from the zero lower bound its (real) balance sheet is limited by...

This paper compares business cycle fluctuations in hours worked by households with substantial capital income and without any capital income. We find that hours worked by households at the 95th percentile of the capital-labor income ratio, or "high-saving hours worked," have a significantly...

Economists have emphasized the importance of “creative destruction” as an engine of growth. The creative destruction process involves a constant reorganization of the economy as old products, firms, factories, and jobs are replaced by new ones. An important part of this process lies in the...

We analyze the democratic politics and competitive economics of a ‘golden rule’ that separates capital and ordinary account budgets and allows a government to issue debt to finance only capital items. Many national governments followed this rule in the 18th and 19th centuries and most U.S....

Many authorities at home and abroad questioned Italy's ability to meet the strict criteria to join the European Monetary Union. The author looks at the interaction between fiscal policy and monetary policy in Italy between 1992, when it exited the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and 1998, when...

This paper considers an optimal taxation environment where household income is private information, and the government randomly audits and punishes households found to be underreporting. We prove that the optimal mechanism derived using standard mechanism design techniques has a bad equilibrium...

Across different layers of the U.S. government there are surprisingly large differences in institutional provisions that impose fiscal discipline, such as constitutionally mandated deficit or debt limits, or specific tax bases. In this paper we develop a framework that can be used to...

How should a government use the power to commit to ensure a desirable equilibrium outcome? In this paper, I show a misleading aspect of what has become a standard approach to this question, and I propose an alternative. I show that the complete description of an optimal (indeed, of any) policy...

The authors analyze whether it makes sense to treat public investment spending differently from other government spending when applying the deficit constraints mandated within the single European currency area. Given the low rates of population growth, mobility, and mortality in European...