While Keynes can be considered the true father of the “unorthodox” monetary policies introduced by the Bank of Japan and the Federal Reserve, these policies also provide the test of their efficacy that Keynes called for. They suggest that Keynes’s Treatise optimism was misplaced, and that...

This paper studies whether politicians manipulate monetary instruments to win elections in the new democracies. The question makes sense because the Central Bank in the new democracy conditions is usually weak. A sample of 8 new democracies is analyzed via individual country vector...

When taxes do not sufficiently adjust to government debt levels, the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level predicts that other variables, such as inflation and output gap, must adjust to ensure the solvency of public finances. We study the role of optimal debt maturity portfolios in this context,...

In a fixed-regime setting, it is known since Leeper (1991) that both monetary dominance (mix of active monetary and passive fiscal policies) and fiscal dominance (mix of active fiscal and passive monetary policy) regimes yield a determinate unique equilibrium. This paper shows that in a...

How should independent central banks react if pressured by fiscal policymakers? We study an environment with strategic monetary-fiscal interactions where the central bank has a limited degree of commitment to follow policies over time and the fiscal authority has none. We contrast the...

This paper employs a two-country New Keynesian DSGE model to assess the macroeconomic impact of the changes in monetary policy frameworks and the fiscal support in the U.S. and euro area during the pandemic. Moving from a previous target of “below, but close to 2 percent” to a formal...

Differential requirements for seigniorage provide a weak case for retaining monetary independence. As regards adjustment to asymmetric shocks, nominal exchange rate flexibility is at best a limited blessing and at worst a limited curse. Absence of significant fiscal redistribution mechanisms...

In economic discussions, currency board systems are frequently described as arrangements with self-binding character to the monetary authorities by their strict rules and establishments by law. Hard pegs and especially currency boards are often seen as remedies to overcome economic and financial...

Halving the US current account deficit as a share of GDP is likely to impose a burden of $2,350 per capita on the United States, which explains why US policymakers want to postpone adjustment. The rest of the world relies on the economic stimulus of a widening US external deficit, which explains...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic implications of different regimes of international fiscal coordination and monetary-fiscal cooperation in a monetary union with independent fiscal authorities that act strategically vis a vis a common central bank. In the presence of other policy goals...