The United States experienced an unprecedented increase in unemployment insurance (UI) claims beginning in March 2020. State UI-benefit systems were strained beyond their administrative capacity to process the dual challenge of an unprecedented increase in claims and changes to UI benefits. In...

In this paper, we evaluate the consequences of super-active fiscal policy rules - that is, rules that call for tax cuts and/or spending increases as the government's debt level rises - in a standard New Keynesian model subject to an occasionally-binding zero lower bound on the monetary policy...

I study the welfare performance of a policy regime of fiscal activism in which fiscal policy acts as an automatic stabilizer and controls inflation, while monetary policy pegs the nominal interest rate. When evaluated through the lens of a standard New Keynesian model, accounting for price and...