Search Results
Working Paper
How Biased Are U.S. Government Forecasts of the Federal Debt?
Government debt and forecasts thereof attracted considerable attention during the recent financial crisis. The current paper analyzes potential biases in different U.S. government agencies? one-year-ahead forecasts of U.S. gross federal debt over 1984-2012. Standard tests typically fail to detect biases in these forecasts. However, impulse indicator saturation (IIS) detects economically large and highly significant time-varying biases, particularly at turning points in the business cycle. These biases do not appear to be politically related. IIS defines a generic procedure for examining ...
Journal Article
Pensions in peril
Journal Article
The federal budget for rearmament
Journal Article
Federal fiscal policy in the 1960's
Journal Article
Institutions and government growth: a comparison of the 1890s and the 1930s
Statistics on the size and growth of the U.S. federal government, in addition to public statements by President Franklin Roosevelt, seem to indicate that the Great Depression was the primary event that caused the dramatic growth in government spending and intervention in the private sector that continues to the present day. Through a comparison of the economic conditions of the 1890s and the 1930s, the authors argue that post-1930 government growth in the United States is not the direct result of the Great Depression, but rather is a result of institutional, legal, and societal changes that ...
Journal Article
The federal budget for 1956
Speech
Managing crises without government guarantees—how do we get there?
Remarks at Banking Law Symposium 2011, Paris, France.
Journal Article
The evolution of Treasury cash management during the financial crisis
The U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve System have long enjoyed a close relationship, each helping the other to carry out certain statutory responsibilities. This relationship proved beneficial during the 2008-09 financial crisis, when the Treasury altered its cash management practices to facilitate the Fed?s dramatic expansion of credit to banks, primary dealers, and foreign central banks.
Journal Article
The 1957 budget
Working Paper
Partisan impacts on the economy: evidence from prediction markets and close elections
Political economists interested in discerning the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in expectations about the likely winner during election day. Analyzing high frequency financial fluctuations on November 2 and 3 in 2004, we find that markets anticipated higher equity prices, interest rates, and oil prices and a stronger dollar under a Bush presidency than under Kerry. A similar ...