This paper characterizes empirically how government budget variables, such as spending, taxes, and deficits, affected private-sector consumption in the high-budget-deficit economy of Israel during the first half of the 1980s. The paper develops and estimates an intertemporal optimizing model of...

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical answers to questions related to the propagation of shocks in a high-inflation economy. Do one-time inflationary shocks give rise to long-term persistence, or inertia? Do balance of payments' shocks trigger a process that, through indexation and...

The purpose of this paper is to develop and estimate a stochastic-intertemporal model of consumption behavior and to use it for testing a version of the Ricardian-equivalence proposition with time series data. Two channels that may give rise to deviations from this proposition are specified:...

This paper presents a new set of empirical regularities on the link between interest rates, money supply announcements and monetary base announcements. Among the main findings reported are: (i) unexpected increases in the announced monetary base have a significantly positive effect on interest...

We analyze the dynamics of inflation in an economy characterized by a forward-looking, staggered, price and wage determination process, and by monetary accommodation. In our model, inflation reconciles the conflicting claims of workers and firms. The model is capable of generating a positive...

Prior to the appearance of the Omicron variant, observations on countries like the UK that have accumulated a large fraction of inoculated individuals suggest that, although initially, vaccines have little effect on new infections, they strongly reduce the share of mortality out of a given pool...

The importance of seignorage relative to other sources of government revenue differs markedly across countries. The main theoretical implication of this paper is that countries with more unstable and polarized political systems rely more heavily on seignorage. This result is obtained within the...

Politicians have generally two motives: they wish to hold office as long as possible and wish to implement their preferred policies. Thus they face a trade-off between the policies which maximize their choices of reelection and their most preferred policies (or the policies most preferred by the...

We evaluate quartile rankings of countries during the Covid-19 pandemic using both official (confirmed) and excess mortality data. By December 2021, the quartile rankings of three-fifths of the countries differ when ranked by excess vs. official mortality. Countries that are ‘doing...