When the zero lower bound on nominal interest rate binds, monetary policy makers may lack traditional tools to stimulate aggregate demand. We investigate whether "unconventional" fiscal policy, in the form of pre-announced consumption tax changes, has the potential to meaningfully shift durables...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We provide preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of such policies using changes in...

In HANK, we show that fiscal policy is an appropriate macroeconomic stabilization tool at the ZLB. Fiscal policy achieves the same macroeconomic aggregates and the same welfare as hypothetically unconstrained monetary policy by replicating its transmission mechanism. Consumption taxes and labor...

We exploit the unexpected announcement of an immediate, temporary VAT cut in Germany in the second half of 2020 as a natural experiment to study the spending response to unconventional fiscal policy. We use survey and scanner data on households' consumption expenditures and their perceived...

We use novel transaction-level card expenditure data to estimate the effect of the temporary value-added tax (VAT) cut in Germany 2020. We find that the annualized growth rate of expenditures for durables increased by 6 percentage points (pp) during the tax cut, with a particularly strong...

We use novel transaction-level card expenditure data to estimate the effect of the temporary value-added tax (VAT) cut in Germany 2020. We find that the annualized growth rate of expenditures for durables increased by 6 percentage points (pp) during the tax cut, with a particularly strong...

We use novel transaction-level card expenditure data to estimate the effect of the temporary value-added tax (VAT) cut in Germany 2020. We find that the annualized growth rate of expenditures for durables increased by 6 percentage points (pp) during the tax cut, with a particularly strong...

In HANK, we show that fiscal policy is an appropriate macroeconomic stabilization tool at the ZLB. Fiscal policy achieves the same macroeconomic aggregates and the same welfare as hypothetically unconstrained monetary policy by replicating its transmission mechanism. Consumption taxes and labor...

We show that in a New Keynesian model with household heterogeneity, fiscal policy can be a perfect substitute for monetary policy: three simple conditions for consumption taxes, labor taxes, and the government debt level are sufficient to induce the same consumption and labor supply of each...

This paper shows that the fiscal multiplier for purchases of durable and investment goods is very small - much smaller than the multiplier for nondurable goods. Standard models predict small durables multipliers because private sector purchases of durable goods are highly intertemporally...