During the recent economic crisis, when nominal interest rates were at their effective lower bounds, central banks used forward guidance announcements about future policy rates to conduct their monetary policy. Many policymakers believe that forward guidance will remain in use after the end of...

Much of the recent economic debate about the impact of stimulus packages has focused on the size of the crucial government purchases multiplier. But equally crucial is the size of the government purchases multiplicand--the change in government purchases of goods and services that the multiplier...

Renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy. Because of modelling uncertainty, it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions. We find that models currently being used in practice to evaluate fiscal policy...

This paper examines the causes of the decline in black male teenage employment from 1950 to 1970. During this period, the employment-to-population ratio of black youth (age 16-19) declined from 46.8 percent to 27 percent. The white teenage employment ratio, in contrast, remained constant. The...

Subsidies for health insurance for chronically ill, high-cost individuals may increase coverage in the broader population by improving the functioning of insurance markets. In this paper, we assess an historical example of a policy intervention of this sort, the extension of Medicare to the...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of the tax preference for health insurance on health care spending using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys from 1996-2005. We use the fact that Social Security taxes are only levied on earnings below a statutory threshold to identify the impact...

In this paper, we calculate the consequences for health spending and federal revenues of an above-the-line deduction for out-of-pocket health spending. We show how the response of spending to this expansion in the tax preference can be specified as a function of a small number of behavioral...

Recently we were asked to serve on the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security (CSSS) along with 14 other members drawn equally from both major political parties. The Commission's charge was to provide recommendations to modernize the Social Security system, restore its fiscal...