E62

Damien Capelle · Yang Liu

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of a tax on inflation policy (TIP)—a fiscal instrument that would require firms to pay a tax proportional to the increase in their prices—as a complement to …

John H. Cochrane

Cochrane asks whether U.S. postwar inflation can be understood using a "frictionless" fiscal theory of the price level -- in which the price level is pinned down by the government's intertemporal …

Atif Mian · Ludwig Straub · Amir Sufi

This paper develops a tractable continuous-time model to study the fiscal sustainability of government deficits and the joint dynamics of public debt, with two main ingredients: an endogenous interest …

Rüdiger Bachmann · Benjamin Born · Olga Goldfayn-Frank · Georgi Kocharkov · Ralph Luetticke · Michael Weber

The paper studies Germany's temporary 3 percentage-point VAT cut from July 1 to December 31, 2020 (standard rate 19%→16%, reduced rate 7%→5%), combining two causal identification strategies with …

Olivier Blanchard · Roberto Perotti

This paper by Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti (QJE 2002; circulated from 1998) characterizes the dynamic effects of U.S. government spending and net tax shocks on output using a structural VAR …

Robert J. Barro

This 1974 Journal of Political Economy paper by Robert Barro asks whether an increase in government bonds raises households' perceived net wealth, and argues that within an overlapping-generations …

George-Marios Angeletos · Chen Lian · Christian K. Wolf

The paper asks whether a government can run a deficit today — issuing "stimulus checks" — and allow debt to return to its initial level without any future tax hike or spending cut. In environments …

Valerie A. Ramey

Surveying theory, aggregate U.S. time-series evidence, and the newer cross-state/cross-locality literature on the government-spending multiplier, Ramey concludes that the multiplier for a temporary, …

Kevin X.D. Huang · Qinglai Meng · Jianpo Xue

This paper overturns the longstanding consensus established by Schmitt-Grohé and Uribe (1997) that relying on capital income tax adjustments to balance the government budget immunizes the economy …

Christoph Grosse-Steffen · Laura Pagenhardt · Malte Rieth

A central debate in fiscal policy is whether fiscal rules—numerical constraints on budget deficits or debt levels—impair a government's ability to respond to adverse economic shocks, creating a …

Anastasiia Antonova · Gernot J. Müller

This paper asks how governments should optimally adjust sector-specific taxes in response to sectoral shocks when monetary policy cannot be tailored to individual sectors. The authors work within a …

Thomas Herndon · M. Ash · Robert Pollin

A critical replication of Reinhart and Rogoff's "Growth in a Time of Debt" using their own working spreadsheet, which identifies three separate problems -- an unexplained exclusion of early post-war …

Christopher A. Sims

Sims argues that fiat government debt is best understood as analogous to privately issued equity rather than to privately issued debt, since it promises only future paper rather than a commodity the …

Rishabh Aggarwal · Adrien Auclert · Matthew Rognlie · Ludwig Straub

In a multi-country heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model, debt-financed fiscal transfers eventually raise the world interest rate and are entirely absorbed by foreign lenders, but in the short run a …

Adrien Auclert · Matthew Rognlie · Ludwig Straub

Auclert, Rognlie, and Straub review a decade of Heterogeneous-Agent New Keynesian (HANK) research through a single canonical model, showing that monetary and balanced-budget fiscal policy have …

Christopher A. Sims

Applying the fiscal theory of the price level's corporate-finance analogy -- fiat (own-currency) government debt behaves like equity, while dollar-denominated or indexed debt behaves like conventional …

Hanno Lustig · Christopher Sleet · Şevin Yeltekin

Solving a Ramsey model of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in which the government can finance itself only with non-contingent nominal bonds of various maturities, this paper finds that optimal …

Michael Woodford

Woodford argues that commitment to a sound monetary policy rule, such as a Taylor rule, cannot by itself guarantee price stability, because Ricardian equivalence fails to make fiscal policy irrelevant …

Valerie A. Ramey · Sarah Zubairy

Using a newly constructed quarterly US data set spanning 1889–2015 — built specifically to include the large wars and deep recessions that the post-WWII sample most of the literature relies on simply …

Carlos Arteta · Steven Kamin · Franz U. Ruch

This paper examines how the effects of rising U.S. interest rates on emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) depend on the underlying source of the interest rate increase. Specifically, it …

Daniel Lewis · Davide Melcangi · Laura Pilossoph

Lewis, Melcangi, and Pilossoph estimate the unconditional distribution of the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) using the 2008 Economic Stimulus Act (ESA) rebate payments, deploying Gaussian …

John H. Cochrane

Extending the fiscal theory of the price level to long-term government debt, Cochrane shows that the maturity structure of outstanding debt determines whether news about future deficits shows up as …

Alan J. Auerbach · Yuriy Gorodnichenko

This 2012 American Economic Journal: Economic Policy paper by Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko estimates how government spending multipliers vary with the state of the business cycle, using a …

Jacob D Orchard · Valerie A Ramey · Johannes F Wieland

Do the high marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) estimated in the leading household studies of the 2008 U.S. tax rebates—particularly Parker et al. (2013), which found MPCs of 50–90 percent within …

Greg Kaplan · Benjamin Moll · Giovanni L. Violante

This paper builds a two-asset Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model matching the empirical joint distribution of income, liquid, and illiquid wealth, and finds that the indirect effect of an …

Florin O. Bilbiie

THANK, a tractable heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model built around a single statistic for the cyclicality of income inequality, shows that the conditions needed for HANK-style amplification of …

Luis G. Hernández-Román

This paper employs a proxy structural VAR model to examine the effects of global supply chain (GSC) shocks on U.S. macroeconomic variables and the Federal Reserve's historical response, and evaluates …

Sebastian Schmidt

The paper builds a discrete-time DSGE model with Calvo sticky prices in which the public sector has two feedback rules that can hit corners, generating endogenous shifts between an "orthodox" regime …

Adrien Auclert · Bence Bardóczy · Matthew Rognlie

This paper shows that New Keynesian models with frictionless labor supply cannot simultaneously match three well-established empirical facts -- high marginal propensities to consume, low marginal …

Thomas Winberry · Adrien Auclert · Matthew Rognlie · Ludwig Straub

Winberry, Auclert, Rognlie, and Straub extend the Heterogeneous-Agent New Keynesian framework from households to firms, building a canonical heterogeneous-firm model with financial frictions in which …

Jonathan A. Parker

This 2011 *Journal of Economic Literature* forum essay by Jonathan Parker argues that as of early 2009 economists had no good measure of how government spending affects output specifically in a …

S. Rao Aiyagari

Against Chamley's (1986) and Lucas's (1990) result that the optimal long-run capital income tax is zero, this paper shows that in a Bewley-type incomplete-markets economy with uninsured idiosyncratic …

Adrien Auclert · Michael Cai · Matthew Rognlie · Ludwig Straub

Using a new sequence-space method for characterizing the long-run ("Ramsey") steady state of dynamic optimal-taxation problems, this paper finds that for standard calibrations of Aiyagari (1995)-style …

Sushant Acharya · Edouard Challe · Keshav Dogra

An analytically tractable heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian (HANK) model in which a utilitarian planner's optimal monetary policy departs from the representative-agent benchmark because interest rates …

Alisdair McKay · Christian K. Wolf

This paper characterizes optimal monetary and fiscal policy rules in a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian (HANK) model and finds that a "dual mandate" central bank's optimal targeting rule is identical …

Christopher L. House · Matthew D. Shapiro

This paper by Christopher House and Matthew Shapiro (AER 2006; NBER WP 10415, April 2004) uses a dynamic general equilibrium model to quantify how the *timing* of a legislated tax-rate change -- not …

Boaz Abramson · Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Abramson and Van Nieuwerburgh study Rent Guarantee Insurance (RGI), a product in which an insurer pays the landlord on behalf of a tenant who defaults on rent due to a negative income or health …

Harold L. Cole · Timothy Kehoe

A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which a government that must roll over one-period debt can be forced into default purely because lenders expect it -- and a characterisation of …

Michael Woodford

This paper works through a series of simple, analytically solvable New Keynesian models to show that the size of the government-spending multiplier depends almost entirely on the monetary policy …

Harald Uhlig

In a calibrated neoclassical growth model with distortionary labor and capital taxes, an ARRA-style government spending increase produces short-run net-present-value fiscal multipliers above one, but …

Thomas J. Sargent · Neil Wallace

Sargent and Wallace show that even in a fully monetarist economy, a monetary authority that tightens money today while an independent fiscal authority's deficits are taken as given must finance the …

Christopher A. Sims

Against the standard narrative that only monetary policy errors could have caused or prevented the 1970s US inflation, Sims documents dramatic swings in US fiscal stance over the period and shows, in …

Karel Mertens · Morten O. Ravn

This paper by Karel Mertens and Morten Ravn (AER 2013) estimates the dynamic effects of U.S. federal personal and corporate income tax changes using a new estimator that treats narratively identified …

Marcus Hagedorn · Iourii Manovskii · Kurt Mitman

This paper builds a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model with incomplete markets, capital, and nominal price/wage rigidities -- with a government budget constraint specified in nominal terms …

Adrien Auclert · Matthew Rognlie · Ludwig Straub

This paper derives an "intertemporal Keynesian cross" showing that intertemporal marginal propensities to consume (iMPCs) are sufficient statistics for the output response of fiscal policy in …

Christina D. Romer · David H. Romer

This paper develops a narrative method for identifying postwar U.S. tax changes that are plausibly uncorrelated with other influences on output, in order to get around the omitted-variable bias that …

Greg Kaplan · Giovanni L. Violante

This review systematically compares heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets models to see which model features and calibration strategies can deliver both a realistically large average marginal …

Ömer T. Açikgöz · Marcus Hagedorn · Hans A. Holter · Yikai Wang

Solving the full dynamic Ramsey optimal-taxation problem (not just the welfare-maximizing steady state) in an Aiyagari (1995)-style incomplete-markets economy, this paper proves the long-run optimal …

YiLi Chien · Yi Wen

This paper proves that the "interior" Ramsey steady state routinely assumed in heterogeneous-agent optimal-taxation models -- with a modified-golden-rule interest rate and a positive capital tax, as …

Alisdair McKay · Ricardo Reis

This paper builds a business-cycle model merging the standard incomplete-markets model with the New Keynesian model of nominal rigidities to quantify how much automatic fiscal stabilizers (progressive …

Mamoon Kader · Hashmat Khan · Minjoon Lee · Raúl Razo-García

This paper uses an open-economy heterogeneous-household model with incomplete markets to evaluate the welfare and distributional consequences of the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 — which …

Sushant Acharya · Keshav Dogra

Using an analytically tractable heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model with CARA preferences and normally distributed idiosyncratic income risk, the paper shows that whether incomplete markets …

Adrien Auclert · Matthew Rognlie · Ludwig Straub · Tomáš Ťapák

Most heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian (HANK) models take household portfolios as exogenously fixed. This paper develops a sequence-space method for solving instead for endogenous, risk-hedging …

Lawrence Christiano · Martin Eichenbaum · Sergio Rebelo

The government-spending multiplier can be much larger than one when the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate binds, and the larger the fraction of the spending that occurs while the nominal …