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Journal Article
Understanding the Recent Rise in Municipal Bond Yields
In late March, investors sold off municipal bonds at a rapid pace, depressing municipal bond prices and driving up their yields relative to U.S. Treasuries. We find that this initial investor run on the municipal bond market was likely due to increased liquidity demand rather than credit concerns, making the Federal Reserve’s early actions to relieve liquidity stress effective. Going forward, however, municipal bond prices will likely reflect increased credit concerns.
Journal Article
U.S. Federal Debt Has Increased, but Appears Sustainable for Now
The unprecedented fiscal stimulus packages that Congress passed earlier this year provided timely assistance to households and businesses, but also led to a sharp increase in U.S. federal government debt. We find that the current net federal debt level of about 100 percent of GDP does not pose a threat to fiscal sustainability. Over a longer horizon, debt sustainability will depend, to a large extent, on whether the federal government can curb mandatory spending or raise taxes.
Working Paper
Sovereign Default and Monetary Policy Tradeoffs
The paper is organized around the following question: when the economy moves from a debt-GDP level where the probability of default is nil to a higher level?the ?fiscal limit?? where the default probability is non-negligible, how do the effects of routine monetary operations designed to achieve macroeconomic stabilization change? We find that the specification of the monetary policy rule plays a critical role. Consider a central bank that targets the risky rate. When the economy is near its fiscal limit, a transitory monetary policy contraction leads to a sustained rise in inflation, even ...
Journal Article
The Fiscal Stance of U.S. States
We study the fiscal stance of U.S. states through the lens of state reserve funds. We find that the overall rainy day and unemployment insurance funds have largely recovered since the start of the Great Recession but at an uneven pace across states. More importantly, we find that states are better prepared to meet their own budgetary shortfalls in the event of a downturn than the shortfalls of households.
Journal Article
Federal Government Outlays Remain Historically Elevated, Spurred by Robust Transfers
Over the past six decades, the federal government has shifted a larger share of its outlays toward transfer payments to individuals and state and local governments. These longer-run trends were exacerbated during the pandemic, leading to higher deficits for the federal government and an increasingly high share of federal outlays supporting the economy through consumer spending.
Working Paper
Flight to Liquidity or Safety? Recent Evidence from the Municipal Bond Market
We examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent monetary and fiscal policy actions on municipal bond market pricing. Using high-frequency trading data, we estimate key policy events at the peak of the crisis by focusing on a sample of bonds within a narrow window before and after each policy event. We find that policy interventions, in particular those with explicit credit backstops, were effective in alleviating municipal bond market stress. Next, we exploit daily variation in traded municipal bonds and virus exposure across U.S. counties. We find a shift in how bond investors ...
Journal Article
Implementation Delays in Pension Retrenchment Reforms
As the global population ages, public spending on pensions has increased dramatically. As a result, policymakers have increasingly focused on pension retrenchment reforms to keep their systems solvent. These reforms usually involve long implementation delays to provide retirees time to adjust their retirement plans. However, long implementation delays also slow the rollback of governments? pension spending, potentially raising long-run fiscal risks. {{p}} {{p}} Huixin Bi, Kevin Hunt, and Sarah Zubairy collect a new data set that tracks implementation delays during pension retrenchment reforms ...
Working Paper
Debt-dependent effects of fiscal expansions
Economists often postulate that fiscal expansions are less stimulative when government debt is high than when it is low. Empirical evidence, however, is ambiguous. Using a nonlinear neoclassical growth model, we show that the difference in government spending effects between high- and low-debt environments depends on the wealth effect on labor supply and on whether the government uses taxes or spending to retire debt. Because of interrelated state variables, structural VAR estimations conditioning on debt alone can fail to isolate debt-dependent effects. Also, uncertainty on when the ...
Journal Article
Rainy Day Funds Have Grown as State Tax Revenue Strengthens
Many state governments have seen solid growth in their tax revenues over the past couple of years. We show that recent changes in the federal tax code contributed to the uptick in state revenues. In addition, we show that states have used the recent revenue windfall to build up rainy day funds at a much faster pace than they did before the Great Recession.
Working Paper
Public Pension Reforms and Fiscal Foresight: Narrative Evidence and Aggregate Implications
We explore the evolution of pension policy across countries and investigate the macroeconomic effects of pension structural reforms in recent decades, in particular those with implementation delays. We first document chronological changes in pension policy for 10 OECD countries between 1962 and 2017. The new data set shows that pension systems rapidly expanded between the 1960s and 1980s, followed by a wave of retrenchments since the 1990s. Structural pension reforms, which are motivated by long-run fiscal sustainability concerns, often come with significant implementation delays. We find ...