Advocates of central bank reform must examine why central banks emerged and what forces sustain them. They did not arise in an institutional vacuum, and will not be reformed in an institutional vacuum. The historical origins of central banks explain how they came into existence. The forces...

Does an inflation conservative central bank à la Rogoff (1985) remain desirable in a setting with endogenous fiscal policy? To provide an answer we study monetary and fiscal policy games without commitment in a dynamic stochastic sticky price economy with monopolistic distortions. Monetary...

This article surveys the literature on sovereign debt sustainability from its origins in the mid-1980s to the present, focusing on four debates. First, the shift from an “accounting based” view of debt sustainability, evaluated using government borrowing rates, to a “model based” view...

The creation of central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, is typically discussed from the standpoint of tradeoffs, as if the crucial question at hand were only how to improve the efficiency and security of the payment system, or, more ambitiously, how to design money to fend off global warming,...

We conduct an experiment within a large-scale household survey on public finance in France, the Netherlands and Italy. We elicit prior beliefs via open-ended questions and introduce a measure of macroeconomic policy literacy. An educational blog post from a central bank (CB) that opposes...

We explore the effects of reducing the overall size of the central bank’s balance sheet and lowering its maturity structure. To do so, we consider an environment where fiscal policy is traditionally passive and the central bank follows the Taylor principle. In addition, the monetary authority...

After introducing digital currency, the central bank emerges as a monopolist bank. It then faces an "impossible trinity". To achieve price stability and financial stability, optimal consumption allocation is sacrificed. In this paper, I show that fiscal policy designed in coordination with the...

Not since the Great Depression have monetary policy matters and institutions weighed so heavily in commercial, financial, and political arenas. Apart from the eurozone crisis and global monetary policy issues, for nearly two years all else has counted for little more than noise on a relative...

The U.S. Federal Reserve has committed hundreds of billions of dollars in unprecedented lending activities and purchases of mortgage-backed securities based upon its authority under the Federal Reserve Act, and particularly upon its interpretation of Section 13(3), a formerly untested and unused...

Given the weak economic performance of many countries since the recent crisis, there is an increasing need for structural reforms aimed at promoting long-run economic growth. Structural reforms can entail short-run output costs unless offset by a demand expansion. When monetary policy is...