The fiscal theory states that inflation adjusts so that the real value of government debt equals the present value of real primary surpluses. Monetary policy remains important. The central bank can set an interest rate target, which determines the path of expected inflation, while news about the...

Before the era of large central bank balance sheets, banks relied on incoming payments to fund outgoing payments in order to conserve scarce liquidity. Even in the era of large central bank balance sheets, rather than funding payments with abundant reserve balances, we show that outgoing...

We conduct a systematic analysis of the costs and benefits of large-scale securities purchases, using the Federal Reserve's QE4 program as a concrete example. This program was initiated at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 and continued for two years, leading to a doubling of the Fed's...

The gold standard emerged as the international monetary system by the end of the 19th century. We formally study its properties in a micro-founded model and find that the scarcity of the world gold stock not only results in a suboptimal output of goods that are purchased with money but also...

We consider the debut of a new monetary instrument, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Drawing on examples from monetary history, we argue that a successful monetary transformation must combine microeconomic efficiency with macroeconomic credibility. A paradoxical feature of these...

I discuss private and central-bank-issued digital currencies, summarizing my prior research. I argue that prices of private digital currencies such as bitcoin follow random walks or, more generally, risk-adjusted martingales. For central bank digital currencies, I argue that they enhance the...

I separately identify and estimate the effects of the Federal Reserve's federal funds rate, forward guidance, and large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) policies on the U.S. economy. I extend the high-frequency identification strategy of Bauer and Swanson (2023b) for monetary policy VARs by allowing...

We study a new type of monetary-fiscal interaction in a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model with a fiscal block. Due to household heterogeneity, the stock of public debt affects the natural interest rate, forcing the central bank to adapt its monetary policy rule to the fiscal stance to...

The world economy has experienced the largest financial crisis in generations, a global pandemic, and a resurgence in inflation during the first quarter of the 21st century, yielding important insights for central banking. Price stability has important benefits and is the responsibility of a...

We show that firms' nominal required returns to capital (i.e., their discount rates) are sticky with respect to expected inflation. Such nominally sticky discount rates imply that increases in expected inflation directly lower firms' real discount rates and thereby raise real investment. We...