In various writings Karl Marx made references to an "aristocracy of finance" in Western Europe and the United States that dominated ownership of the public debt. Drawing on original research, this paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of the pattern of public debt ownership within the US...

The paper uses a small open economy general-equilibrium model to compare fiscal and nominal exchange rate devaluation with respect to their impact on economic activity and the current account. In particular, it investigates to which extent fiscal devaluation mimics nominal exchange rate...

We investigate state-dependent effects of fiscal multipliers and allow for endogenous sample splitting to determine whether the US economy is in a slack state. When the endogenized slack state is estimated as the period of the unemployment rate higher than about 12 percent, the estimated...