During long periods of history, countries have pegged their currencies to an international standard (such as gold or the U.S. dollar), severely restricting their ability to create money and affect output, prices, or government revenue. Nevertheless, countries generally have maintained their own...

Total factor productivity (TFP) differs greatly across countries.In this paper, I provide a novel rationalization for these differences.I consider two environments, one in which enforcement is full and the other in which enforcement is limited.In both settings, manufactured goods can be produced...

In the 21st century, many key macroeconomic variables in the developed world have been persistently low, including inflation, output, growth, interest rates (both real and nominal), and labor share. I consider a class of standard representative agent rational expectations models in which...

I reconsider the long-standing consensus view that macroeconomic stabilization should rely on monetary policy, not fiscal policy. I use an analytically tractable heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) model that is parameterized so as to admit a bubble in public debt. In this context, I show...

This paper studies the public debt implications of a class of Aiyagari (1994)-Bewley (1977)-Huggett (1993) (ABH) models of incomplete insurance in which agents face a near-zero probability of a highly adverse outcome. In generic models of this kind, there exists a public debt bubble, so that the...