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Journal Article
COVID-19: Fiscal Implications and Financial Stability in Developing Countries
Grittayaphong, Praew; Restrepo-Echavarria, Paulina (2023-07-14)
The COVID-19 pandemic has been unlike any other crisis that we have experienced in that it hit all economies in the world at the same time, compromising the risk-sharing ability of nations. At the onset of the pandemic, the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) jointly pledged 1.16 trillion U.S. dollars to help emerging economies deal with COVID-19. Would this amount have been enough to preserve financial stability in a worst case scenario, and what were the fiscal implications of the pandemic? In this article we aim to answer these questions by documenting the size of the ...
Review , Volume 105 , Issue 3 , Pages 137-149

Newsletter
How Much Debt Does the U.S. Government Owe?
Wright, Mark L. J.; Friedman, Rebecca (2016)
The U.S. government is often referred to as the world?s biggest debtor. But how much debt does it owe? A visit to the website of the U.S. Department of the Treasury yields a bewildering array of different measures of U.S. federal government debt. Although the gross debt of the U.S. federal government is approaching $18 trillion, the debt that is subject to the debt limit is a few billion dollars smaller, while debt in the hands of the public is less than $13 trillion.
Chicago Fed Letter

Journal Article
Assessing the Costs of Rolling Over Government Debt
Kozlowski, Julian; Jordan-Wood, Samuel (2023-06-02)
The US government has $21.4 trillion in outstanding Treasury debt in bills, notes, and bonds. Given the federal funds rate is up 4-5% over the past year, how expensive will it be to roll over maturing Treasury debt at these higher rates?
Economic Synopses , Issue 13 , Pages 4 pages

Working Paper
Optimal Public Debt with Life Cycle Motives
Sager, Erick; Peterman, William B. (2018-04-20)
Public debt can be optimal in standard incomplete market models with infinitely lived agents, since the associated capital crowd-out induces a higher interest rate. The higher interest rate encourages individuals to save and, hence, better self-insure against idiosyncratic labor earnings risk. Even though individual savings behavior is a crucial determinant of the optimality of public debt, this class of economies abstracts from empirically observed life cycle savings patterns. Thus, this paper studies how incorporating a life cycle affects optimal public debt. We find that while the ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2018-028

Working Paper
How to Starve the Beast: Fiscal and Monetary Policy Rules
Martin, Fernando M. (2019-10-11)
Societies often rely on simple rules to restrict the size and behavior of governments. When fiscal and monetary policies are conducted by a discretionary and profligate government, I find that revenue ceilings vastly outperform debt, deficit and monetary rules, both in effectiveness at curbing public spending and welfare for private agents. However, effective revenue ceilings induce an increase in deficit, debt and inflation. Under many scenarios, including recurrent adverse shocks, the optimal ceiling on U.S. federal revenue is about 15% of GDP, which leads to welfare gains for private ...
Working Papers , Paper 2019-26

Working Paper
How to Starve the Beast: Fiscal Policy Rules
Martin, Fernando M. (2021-04-05)
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. Most of the benefits can still be reaped with a milder constraint or escape clauses during adverse times. Imposing a single fiscal ...
Working Papers , Paper 2019-026

Working Paper
Fiscal Dominance
Martin, Fernando M. (2021-09-20)
Who prevails when fiscal and monetary authorities disagree about the value of public expenditure and how much to discount the future? When the fiscal authority sets debt as its main policy instrument it achieves fiscal dominance, rendering the preferences of the central bank, and thus its independence, irrelevant. When the central bank sets the nominal interest rate it renders fiscal impatience (its debt bias) irrelevant, but still faces its expenditure bias. I find that the expenditure bias has a major impact on welfare through higher public spending, while the effect on other policies is ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-040

Report
Pareto Improving Fiscal and Monetary Policies: Samuelson in the New Keynesian Model
Aguiar, Mark; Amador, Manuel; Arellano, Cristina (2023-06-16)
This paper explores the positive and normative consequences of government bond issuances in a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous agents, focusing on how the stock of government bonds affects the cross-sectional allocation of resources in the spirit of Samuelson (1958). We characterize the Pareto optimal levels of government bonds and the associated monetary policy adjustments that should accompany Pareto-improving bond issuances. The paper introduces a simple phase diagram to analyze the global equilibrium dynamics of inflation, interest rates, and labor earnings in response to changes in ...
Staff Report , Paper 646

Working Paper
The Economic Impact of COVID-19 around the World
Sanchez, Juan M.; Wilkinson, Olivia; Martin, Fernando M. (2022-09)
For over two years, the world has been battling the health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper provides an account of the worldwide economic impact of the COVID-19 shock, measured by GDP growth, employment, government spending, monetary policy, and trade. We find that the COVID-19 shock severely impacted output growth and employment in 2020, particularly in middle-income countries. The government response, mainly consisting of increased expenditure, implied a rise in debt levels. Advanced countries, having easier access to credit markets, experienced the highest ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-030

Discussion Paper
The Rapidly Changing Nature of Japan’s Public Debt
Wheeler, Harry; Klitgaard, Thomas (2016-06-22)
Japan’s general government debt-to-GDP ratio is the highest of advanced economies, due in part to increased spending on social services for an aging population and a level of nominal GDP that has not increased for two decades. The interest rate payments from taxpayers on this debt are moderated by income earned on government assets and by low interest rates. One might think that the Bank of Japan’s purchases of government bonds would further ease the burden on taxpayers, with interest payments to the Bank of Japan on its bond holdings rebated back to the government. Merging the balance ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20160622

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