The long-lasting, widespread COVID-19 pandemic has imposed huge challenges on public health as well as economic recovery. Governments must take an active role in designing and enforcing economic policies to address various problems that pure market forces cannot, such as externalities and the...

Prior to 2020, the Great Recession was the most important macroeconomic shock to the United States economy in generations. Millions lost jobs and homes. At its peak, one in ten workers who wanted a job could not find one. On an annual basis, the economy contracted by more than it had since the...

The COVID-19 pandemic has put immense pressure on the fiscal situation. Central revenues have decelerated while expenditures had to be increased to facilitate economic recovery. Local governments faced even harder challenges as intergovernmental transfers were reduced and room for mobilizing...

Can a large-scale defcit spending program speed up recovery after recession? To answer that question we calibrate a standard neoclassical growth model with US data and assume that an exogenous shock has driven aggregate output far below steady-state level. We calibrate the model such that a...

The output multiplier turns negative before a deficit spending program expires. We show the generality of this unpleasant finding for the standard real business cycle model. We then calibrate an extended model for the US and demonstrate how fiscal stimulus slows down economic recovery from...