This paper upholds the classical Keynesian position that a laissez-faire market economy lacks a spontaneous tendency to full employment. Focusing on the UK case, it argues that monetary policy could not prevent the economic collapse of 2008-9 or achieve full recovery from the Great Recession...

I build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with search and matching frictions in the labor market and analyze the optimal monetary policy response to an outward shift in the Beveridge curve. The results cover several cases depending on the reason for the shift. If the shift is due to...

Persistent unemployment after recessions and the policies required to bring it down are the subject of an ongoing debate. One view suggests there are fundamental changes in the labor market that imply a long-term higher rate of unemployment, requiring the implementation of structural policy...

Over the last few decades, real interest rates have trended downward in many countries. The most common explanation is that this reflects depressed demand due to demographic, technological and other real factors such as income inequality. In this paper we explore the claim that these trends may...

We infer determinants of Latin American hyperinflations and stabilizations by using the method of maximum likelihood to estimate a hidden Markov model that potentially assigns roles both to fundamentals in the form of government deficits that are financed by money creation and to destabilizing...

The recent European economic crisis has dramatically exposed the failures of the various institutional mechanisms in place to maintain economic stability in Europe, and has unveiled the difficulty in achieving international coordination on fiscal and financial stability policies. Drawing on the...

New Zealand currently charges some classes of capital gains to income tax, but there is no tax on capital gains as such. The Tax Working Group recently established by the government has however recommended that there should be such a tax. That is, it has recommended that New Zealand should, like...

This paper studies the main channels through which interest rate normalization has fiscalimplications in the United States. While unexpected inflation reduces the real value ofgovernment liabilities, a rising policy rate increases government financing needs because ofhigher interest payments and...