This paper develops and empirically tests a political economy model of sovereign debt. The main incentive for repaying sovereign debt is to maintain access to international capital markets. However, in a democracy, one generation may choose default regardless of its consequences for future...

The paper provides an alternative explanation for the ""resource curse"" based on the income effect resulting from high government current spending in resource rich economies. Using a simple life cycle framework, we show that private investment in the non-resource sector is adversely affected if...

The estimates of potential output and the output gap presented in this paper are not official IMF estimates. The programs and potential output estimates in this paper can be downloaded from www.douglaslaxton.org.The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily...

The Fed has taken several steps towards strengthening its monetary framework over the past several years. Those steps have supported the Fed's efforts to stimulate the economy through forward guidance despite being constrained by having policy rates at zero. We show that an optimal control...

The gap between potential and actual output—the output gap—is a key variable for policymaking. This paper adapts the methodology developed in Blagrave and others (2015) to estimate the path of output gap in the U.S. economy. The results show that the output gap has considerably shrunk since...

Estimates of potential output and the neutral short-term interest rate play important roles in policy making. However, such estimates are associated with significant uncertainty and subject to significant revisions. This paper extends the structural multivariate filter methodology by adding a...

Estimates of potential output are an important component of a structured forecasting and policy analysis system. Using information on capacity utilization, this paper extends the multivariate filter developed by Laxton and Tetlow (1992) and modified by Benes and others (2010), Blagrave and...

Data show that middle-income households have continued moving down, and less so up, the income distribution in the United States since the 1970s-a phenomenon that is often referred to as the polarization or 'hollowing out' of the income distribution. While the level of income polarization is...

The paper uses a combination of micro-level datasets to document the rise of income polarization-what some have referred to as the 'hollowing out' of the income distribution-in the United States, since the 1970s. While in the initial decades more middle-income households moved up, rather than...