The strong monetary policy actions undertaken by advanced economies' central banks have led to complaints of “currency wars” by some emerging market economies, and to widespread demands for more macroeconomic policy coordination. This paper revisits these issues. It concludes that, while...

The strong monetary policy actions undertaken by advanced economies' central banks have led to complaints of "currency wars" by some emerging market economies, and to widespread demands for more macroeconomic policy coordination. This paper revisits these issues. It concludes that, while...

Although most of the political-economy literature blames inefficient policies on institutions or politicians' motives to supply bad policy, voters may themselves be partially responsible by demanding bad policy. In this paper, we posit that voters may systematically err when assessing potential...

Firms sometimes comply with externality-correcting policies by gaming the measure that determines policy. We show theoretically that such gaming can benefit consumers, even when it induces them to make mistakes, because gaming leads to lower prices by reducing costs. We use our insights to...

We explore Tinbergen's fundamental insight that policymakers need at least as many policy instruments as targets. We extend this idea using a large natural field experiment in water resource management. We use social comparisons and loss-framed messages to help achieve two goals of our partner...

Although most of the political-economy literature blames inefficient policies on institutions or politicians' motives to supply bad policy, voters may themselves be partially responsible by demanding bad policy. In this paper, we posit that voters may systematically err when assessing potential...

Firms sometimes comply with externality-correcting policies by gaming the measure that determines policy. We show theoretically that such gaming can benefit consumers, even when it induces them to make mistakes, because gaming leads to lower prices by reducing costs. We use our insights to...

We explore Tinbergen's fundamental insight that policymakers need at least as many policy instruments as targets. We extend this idea using a large natural field experiment in water resource management. We use social comparisons and loss-framed messages to help achieve two goals of our partner...

We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy at the zero lower bound. We first estimate a Markov-switching VAR to highlight that a zero-lower-bound regime captures most of the comovements during the Great...