The roles of central banks in the advanced economies have expanded and multiplied since the beginning of the crisis. The conventional monetary policy roles - setting interest rates in the pursuit of macroeconomic stability and acting as lender of last resort and market maker of last resort to...

This paper considers the economic and political drivers of sovereign default, focusing on countries rich enough to render sovereign default a ‘won’t pay’ rather than a ‘can’t pay’ phenomenon. Unlike many private contracts, sovereign debt contracts rely almost exclusively on...

Central banks’ economic and political importance has grown in advanced economies since the start of the Great Financial Crisis in 2007. An unwillingness or inability of governments to use countercyclical fiscal policy has made monetary policy the only stabilization tool in town. However, much...

This paper aims to provide a rigorous analysis of Milton Friedman’s famous parable of the ‘helicopter’ drop of money. A helicopter drop of money is a permanent/irreversible increase in the nominal stock of fiat base money with a zero nominal interest rate, which respects the intertemporal...

A fall in house prices due to a change in fundamental value redistributes wealth from those long housing (for whom the fundamental value of the house they own exceeds the present discounted value of their planned future consumption of housing services) to those short housing. In a representative...

This 2003 Institute for Fiscal Studies Lecture addresses two sets of issues relevant to current and prospective future E(M)U members: the consequences of the Stability and Growth Pact for fiscal-financial sustainability and macroeconomic stability, and some risks associated with operational...

In a competitive two-country overlapping generations model with perfect capital mobility, a plan that is individually Pareto optimal (that is Pareto optimal with respect to individual preferences) can be sustained without coordination of national fiscal policies where the fiscal arsenal is...

The Paper deals with the principles that should govern the design of budgetary and financial policy. The analytical divorce between stabilisation policy, which concerns deviations from full employment (or full information) equilibrium and allocative policy which concerns the full employment (or...

The paper first reviews the budget identities of the fiscal and monetary authorities and the solvency constraint or present value budget constraint of the consolidated public sector, for both closed and open economies. It then discusses the new conventional wisdom concerning the fiscal roots of...

It is not common for an entire scholarly literature to be based on a fallacy, that is, "on faulty reasoning; misleading or unsound argument". The 'fiscal theory of the price level', recently re-developed by Woodford, Cochrane, Sims and others, is an example of a fatally flawed research...