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Working Paper
How to Starve the Beast: Fiscal Policy Rules
Martin, Fernando M. (2023-08-08)
Countries have widely imposed fiscal rules designed to constrain government spending and ensure fiscal responsibility. This paper studies the effectiveness and welfare implications of expenditure, revenue, budget balance and debt rules when governments are discretionary and prone to overspending. The optimal prescription is either an expenditure ceiling or a combination of revenue and primary deficit ceilings. Most of the benefits can still be reaped with constraints looser than optimal or escape clauses during adverse times. When imposed on their own, revenue ceilings are only mildly ...
Working Papers , Paper 2019-026

Working Paper
Tempting FAIT: Flexible Average Inflation Targeting and the Post-COVID U.S. Inflation Surge
Martínez García, Enrique; Duncan, Roberto; Miller, Luke (2026-06)
In August 2020, the Federal Reserve adopted Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (FAIT), permitting inflation to temporarily exceed the 2% target. Using synthetic control methods, we estimate that FAIT raised headline CPI inflation by 1 percentage point and core CPI by 0.5 percentage points, relative to a no-FAIT-adoption counterfactual, with short-lived effects concentrated during the 2021 inflation surge. Short-term inflation expectations increased by 0.8 percentage points, while long-term expectations remained well anchored. Real economic effects were statistically insignificant. The ...
Working Papers , Paper 2511

Conference Paper
Capital controls: a normative analysis
Lipinska, Anna; De Paoli, Bianca (2012-11)
Countries' concerns with the value of their currency have been extensively studied and documented in the literature. Capital controls can be (and often are) used as a tool to manage exchange rate fluctuations. This paper investigates whether countries can benefi t from using such a tool. We develop a welfare based analysis of whether (or, in fact, how)countries should tax international borrowing. Our results suggest that managing exchange rate movements with the use of these taxes can be benefi cial for individual countries although it would limit cross-border pooling of risk. This is because ...
Proceedings , Issue Nov , Pages 1-36

Report
Shotgun Wedding: Fiscal and Monetary Policy
Sargent, Thomas J.; Bassetto, Marco (2020-04-08)
This paper describes interactions between monetary and fiscal policies that affect equilibrium price levels and interest rates by critically surveying theories about (a) optimal anticipated inflation, (b) optimal unanticipated inflation, and (c) conditions that secure a “nominal anchor” in the sense of a unique price level path. We contrast incomplete theories whose inputs are budget-feasible sequences of government issued bonds and money with complete theories whose inputs are bond-money strategies described as sequences of functions that map time t histories into time t government ...
Staff Report , Paper 599

Working Paper
How to Starve the Beast: Fiscal Policy Rules
Martin, Fernando M. (2020-04-10)
Countries have widely imposed fiscal rules designed to constrain government spending and ensure fiscal responsibility. This paper studies the effectiveness and welfare implications of revenue, deficit and debt rules when governments are discretionary and profligate. The optimal prescription is a revenue ceiling coupled with a balance budget requirement. For the U.S., the optimal revenue ceiling is about 15% of output, 3 percentage points below the postwar average, and yields welfare gains equivalent to 10% of consumption. Most of the benefits can still be reaped with a milder constraint or ...
Working Papers , Paper 2019-026

Working Paper
Earnings Inequality and the Minimum Wage: Evidence from Brazil
Engbom, Niklas; Moser, Christian (2018-03-12)
We show that an increase in the minimum wage can have large effects throughout the earnings distribution, using a combination of theory and evidence. To this end, we develop an equilibrium search model featuring empirically relevant worker and firm heterogeneity. The minimum wage induces firms to adjust their equilibrium wage and vacancy policies, leading to spillovers on higher wages. We use the estimated model to evaluate the effects of a 119 percent increase in the real minimum wage in Brazil from 1996 to 2012. The policy change explains a large decline in earnings inequality, with ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 7

Working Paper
The Federal Reserve System and World War I: Designing Policies without Precedent
Jacobson, Margaret M.; Tallman, Ellis W. (2015-07-07)
The Federal Reserve System failed to prevent the collapse of intermediation during the Great Depression (1929-1933) and took action as if it was unaware of policies that should have been taken in the event of widespread bank runs. The National Banking Era panics and techniques to alleviate them should have been useful references for how to alleviate a financial crisis. We suggest that the overwhelming effort to finance World War I combined with a perspective held by contemporary Federal Reserve officials that the central bank legislation was sufficient to overcome financial crises are key ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1510

Working Paper
Fiscal Dominance
Martin, Fernando M. (2023-02-27)
Central banks' resolve and independence is chronically tested by fiscal authorities wishing to impose their desired policies, often leading to socially undesirable economic outcomes. I study how the fiscal and monetary authorities' disagreement over outcomes and their choice of active instruments shape the implementation of policy, dispensing with commitment or first-mover advantage. I characterize the equilibrium for various combinations of active (and correspondingly, passive) instruments, identify which sources of disagreement play a role in each case, and show whether and under what ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-040

Working Paper
Preventive vs. Curative Medicine: A Macroeconomic Analysis of Health Care over the Life Cycle
Ozkan, Serdar (2023-09-19)
This paper studies differences in health care usage and health outcomes between low- and high-income individuals. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) I find that early in life the rich spend significantly more on health care, whereas from midway through life until very old age the medical spending of the poor dramatically exceeds that of the rich. In addition, low-income individuals are less likely to incur any medical expenditures in a given year, yet, when they do incur medical expenditures, the amounts are more likely to be extreme. To account for these facts, I ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-025

Working Paper
Attenuating the Forward Guidance Puzzle : Implications for Optimal Monetary Policy
Schmidt, Sebastian; Yoo, Paul; Nakata, Taisuke; Ogaki, Ryota (2018-07-19)
We examine the implications of less powerful forward guidance for optimal policy using a sticky-price model with an effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates as well as a discounted Euler equation and Phillips curve. When the private-sector agents discount future economic conditions more in making their decisions today, an announced cut in future interest rates becomes less effective in stimulating current economic activity. While the implication of such discounting for optimal policy depends on its degree, we find that, under a wide range of plausible degrees of discounting, it ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2018-049

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