The ongoing post-pandemic inflation burst has put the monetary policy framework, its governance alternatives, and the evolution in central banking to a critical test. investigates the causes of this inflationary process and explores the extent to which central banks may have contributed to it....

The rise of independent institutions, particularly central banks, and the increasing significance of the interplay between monetary, fiscal, and financial policies demand a critical reassessment of modern macroeconomic constitutions and their institutional architectures.The paper's core focus...

Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives, Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims (Sept. 29, 2005) contends that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment has been misconstrued as mandating birthright citizenship. Rather, the clause was a...

A theoretical role for the government in the financial markets consists of: regulation (passive rules), intervention (active discretion), and their personal financing needs. Three of the most important regulatory rules for maintaining a stable economy are: a clear understanding of the...

Since the War on Poverty began in 1964, the American welfare state has undergone a drastic expansion. That year, national defense spending accounted for 46 percent of all federal outlays, while entitlements consumed 29 percent. In 2020, the entitlement share is predicted to be 66 percent while...

The biggest and most well-known unsolved problem in academic finance is famously referred to as the Equity Premium Puzzle. It refers to the unexplained phenomenon that for over 100 years the average return on a well-diversified portfolio of equities has far outperformed that of risk-free,...

I study the history and performance of commercial real estate (CRE) in the pension fund portfolio, showing how many plan sponsors fundamentally changed their approach to CRE investment once underfunding gaps began to emerge in the early and middle 2000s. Several new empirical facts are...

Countries increasingly rely on independent fiscal councils to constrain policymakers' discretion and curb the bias towards excessive deficits and pro-cyclical policies. Since fiscal councils are often recent and heterogeneous across countries, assessing their impact is challenging. Using the...

The paper discusses the effectiveness of independent fiscal institutions -- or fiscal councils -- in taming the deficit bias that emerged in the 1970s. After a review of the main theoretical arguments and recent trends about fiscal councils, we develop a stylized model showing how a fiscal...