During the 2020 COVID-19 epidemic, the US Congress passed the CARES Act that (among other measures) provides direct payments to households. Using a large debit cards database, we analyze consumer expenditures following the stimulus payments. We observe Zip code level daily transactions (approx....

This paper presents a model in which economic crises have positive effects on welfare. Periods of very high inflation create the incentive for the resolution of social conflict and thus facilitate the introduction of economic reforms and the achievement of higher levels of welfare. Policies to...

As the international demand for knowledge sharing for development cooperation is growing, supply of development experiences is increasing from diverse sources that include traditional donor countries, middle-income countries and even low-income countries (TT-SSC, 2011). Many countries and...

Erceg et al. (2000) show that when both wages and prices are sticky, maximization of expected utility is equivalent to minimizing a loss function with three terms, involving measures of the variability of wage inflation, price inflation and the output gap respectively. Here we generalize their...

The traditional approaches to “cure” economic recessions are monetary and fiscal policies. Most economic crises are first addressed with monetary instruments, as the Federal Reserve’s extensive corporate bond purchasing program of March 24, 2020, has shown. However, when interest rates are...

When a stabilization has significant distributional implications (as in the case of tax increases to eliminate a large budget deficit) different socio-economic groups will attempt to shift the burden of stabilization onto other groups. The process leading to a stabilization becomes a "war of...

I use geocoded data on Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans to investigate the spatial distribution of PPP originations. I document three findings. First, half of bank loans come from banks with branches within 2 miles of the borrower. Second, borrowers using a nearby bank get credit sooner,...

This paper derives a closed-form solution for optimally allocating resources among heterogeneous individuals subject to individual-specific allocation constraints assuming the planner has CES-preferences and returns to allocations are non-increasing. We derive the optimal allocation of stimulus...

Recent influential work argue that a gradual increase in sales tax stimulates economic activityin a liquidity trap by boosting inflation expectations. Higher public infrastructure investmentshould also be more expansive in a liquidity trap than in normal times by raising the potentialinterest...

This paper considers two alternative approaches to stabilizing an economy with firm-specific productivity disturbances. The first uses wage contracts tying wages in each firm to these disturbances as well as the price level. The second uses a tax on firms which modifies their supply behavior...