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Jel Classification:E61 

Working Paper
Optimal monetary policy in a currency union with interest rate spreads

We introduce ?financial imperfections? - asymmetric net wealth positions, incomplete risksharing, and interest rate spread across member countries - in a prototypical two-country currency union model and study implications for monetary policy transmission mechanism and optimal policy. In addition to, and independent from, the standard transmission mechanism associated with nominal rigidities, financial imperfections introduce a wealth redistribution role for monetary policy. Moreover, the two mechanisms reinforce each other and amplify the effects of monetary policy. On the normative side, ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 150

Working Paper
How to Starve the Beast: Fiscal Policy Rules

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

Journal Article
Is the Last Mile More Arduous?

US inflation surged starting in spring 2021, with Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation reaching a 40-year high of 9 percent in mid-2022. Together with improving supply-chain conditions, policy tightening by the Fed decreased inflation to within 1 to 2 percentage points of its 2 percent target by late 2023 without a significant increase in unemployment. However, concerns have been raised that the last mile of disinflation to reduce inflation consistently to its 2 percent target will be more arduous than the previous miles. Close examination of such concerns indicates that they do not receive ...
Policy Hub , Volume 2024 , Issue 1

Working Paper
Optimal Unemployment Insurance Requirements

In the U.S., workers must satisfy two requirements to receive unemployment insurance (UI): a tenure requirement of a minimum work spell and a monetary requirement of a past minimum earnings. Using discontinuity of UI rules at state borders, we find that the monetary requirement decreases the number of employers and the share of part-time workers, while the tenure requirement has the opposite effect. In a quantitative model, the monetary requirement induce workers to search longer because low paying jobs are not covered by UI. Since it mitigates moral hazard, the optimal UI design has a high ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2022-45

Working Paper
Capital Taxation with Heterogeneous Discounting and Collateralized Borrowing

We study optimal long-run capital taxation in a closed economy with heterogeneity in agents' time-discount factors where borrowing is allowed but restricted by a collateral constraint. Financial frictions distort intertemporal optimization margins and the tax system serves a dual role: first, it is used to finance government consumption; second, it serves to alleviate the distortions arising from the binding collateral constraint. The discrepancy between the private and the social discount factors pushes for a subsidy on capital, while the discrepancy introduced by the collateral constraint ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2017-053

Working Paper
Welfare Implications of Asset Pricing Facts: Should Central Banks Fill Gaps or Remove Volatility?

I find that removing consumption volatility is a priority over filling the gap between consumption and its flexible-price counterpart, or inflation targeting, in a model that matches empirical measures of the welfare costs of consumption fluctuations. Nearly 30 years of financial market data suggest sizable welfare costs of fluctuations that can be decomposed into a term structure that is downward-sloping on average, especially during downturns. This evidence offers guidance in selecting a model to study the benefits of macroeconomic stabilization from a structural perspective. The addition ...
Working Papers , Paper 21-16R

Working Paper
Macro Credit Policy and the Financial Accelerator

This paper studies macro credit policies within the celebrated financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The focus is on borrower-based restrictions on lending such as loan-to-value (LTV) ratios. We find that the efficacy of cyclical taxes on LTV ratios depends upon the nature of the underlying loan contract. If the loan contract contains equity-like features such as indexation to aggregate conditions, then there is little role for cyclical taxation. But if the loan contract is not indexed to aggregate conditions, then there are substantial gains to procyclical ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1531

Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information

This paper studies the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. We consider a model in which a principal insures an agent whose privately observed endowment follows an ergodic, finite Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, the optimal contract also features backloaded high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his report increases without bound. ...
Working Papers , Paper 2018-020

Working Paper
How does government spending stimulate consumption?

Recent empirical work finds that government spending shocks cause aggregate consumption to increase over the business cycle, contrary to the predictions of Neoclassical and New Keynesian models. This paper proposes a mechanism to account for the consumption increase that builds on the framework of imperfect information in Lucas (1972) and Lorenzoni (2009). In my model, owners of firms targeted by an increase in government spending perceive an increase in their permanent income relative to their future tax liabilities. Owners of firms not targeted remain unaware of the implicit increase in ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 157

Working Paper
Fiscal Dominance

Central banks' resolve and independence are 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

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Martin, Fernando M. 13 items

Nakata, Taisuke 10 items

Bloedel, Alex 6 items

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Krishna, R. Vijay 6 items

Leukhina, Oksana 6 items

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