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Discussion Paper
Money Aggregates, Debt, Pent-Up Demand, and Inflation: Evidence from WWII
The COVID-19 pandemic produced a massive decline in U.S. consumption in 2020 and swift fiscal and monetary responses. After growing at a rather steady 5 percent rate for decades, the moneysupply (M2) increased 25 percent over the past year alongside unprecedented fiscal support, raising some inflationary concerns. Concurrent with the reopening of the economy as vaccines roll out, this article derives some lessons from the U.S. experience during and after WWII. The debt-to-GDP ratio increased from 40 percent to 110 percent because of the war effort. Most of it was financed by Fed debt ...
Discussion Paper
COVID-19 International Evidence: Some Notable Puzzles
This article uses international evidence to argue that we still have limited knowledge about the efficacy of widely used preventive actions, such as social distancing and face masks, in containing the spread of the novel COVID-19 virus. I document three puzzles. One, Peru enacted unprecedented lockdowns early in the pandemic, which led to a record contraction in economic activity. The country’s residents also adopted near-universal face mask usage. None of these actions, however, prevented Peru from experiencing the world’s highest per capita mortality rate from the virus. Second, ...
Working Paper
Sticker shocks: using VAT changes to estimate upper-level elasticities of substitution
We estimate the upper-level elasticity of substitution between goods and services of a nested aggregate CES preference specification. We show how this elasticity can be derived from the long-run response of the relative price of a good to a change in its VAT rate. We estimate this elasticity using new data on changes in VAT rates across 74 goods and services for 25 E.U. countries from 1996 through 2015. Our results point to an upper-level elasticity of between 1, at a high level of aggregation that distinguishes 12 categories of goods and services, and 3, at the lowest level of aggregation ...
Discussion Paper
Money Aggregates, Debt, Pent-Up Demand, and Inflation: Evidence from WWII
The COVID-19 pandemic produced a massive decline in U.S. consumption in 2020 and swiftfiscal and monetary responses. After growing at a rather steady 5 percent rate for decades, the moneysupply (M2) increased 25 percent over the past year alongside unprecedented fiscal support, raisingsome inflationary concerns. Concurrent with the reopening of the economy as vaccines roll out, thisarticle derives some lessons from the U.S. experience during and after WWII. The debt-to-GDP ratioincreased from 40 percent to 110 percent because of the war effort. Most of it was financed by Fed debtpurchases, ...