Using the government's intertemporal budget constraint, we quantify the contribution of returns paid on the U.S. government's debt portfolio to the evolution of the debt-to-GDP ratio. We show that announcements of unconventional monetary policy measures by the Federal Reserve between 2008.IV and...

The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent seeking motives increase public debt and deficit. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. An implication of this argument is that governments will under-save during a...

According to standard economic theory, fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical. In the neoclassical smoothing model of Barro (1979), a government should optimally run surpluses in good times and deficits in bad times. That is the same a government should do, though for different reasons, in the...

This paper provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of the relation between the cyclicality of fiscal policy, output volatility, and economic growth, using a large cross-section of 88 countries over the period 1960 to 2004. Identification of the effects of (endogenous) cyclical fiscal...

Political polarization combined with political turnover have been shown to amplify economic fluctuations (Azzimonti and Talbert, 2014). This paper analyzes a fiscal policy institution capable of reducing the volatility caused by these political frictions. We introduce the distinction between...

This paper identifies a sharp decline in the volatility of consol prices after the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. The volatility of consol returns drops by more than half after 1815 and our empirical testing confirms a long period of remarkable stability that includes the entire Victorian...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to examine the quantitative macroeconomic implications of countercyclical fiscal policy for France, Germany and the UK. The model incorporates real wage rigidity which is the particular market failure justifying policy...

The primary focus of this research is to study the impact of Foreign Exchange Reserve changes on key economic indicators, namely Inflation and the Exchange Rate of Bangladesh. In addition, the article seeks to illustrate the effects of recent theft from Bangladesh Bank's reserve on Bangladeshi...

This paper applies ARDL and Nonlinear ARDL models to long-term inflation targeting policy mechanisms in the United States and China to assess the impact of oil price dynamics and asymmetries on inflation expectations in the two countries, as well as the difference of this impact before and after...

We introduce a Nelson-Siegel type interest rate term structure model with the underlying yield factors following autoregressive processes revealing time-varying stochastic volatility. The factor volatilities capture risk inherent to the term struc- ture and are associated with the time-varying...