Economists generally believe that countercyclical fiscal policies have stabilizing effects that work through automatic stabilizers and discretionary actions. Analyses underlying this conventional wisdom focus on intratemporal margins: how employment and personal income respond in the short run...

We consider price level determination from the perspective of portfolio choice. Arbitrages among money balances, bonds, and investment goods determine their relative demands. Returns to real balance holdings (transactions services), the nominal interest rate, and after-tax returns to investment...

We present a framework for computing and evaluating linear projections of macro variables conditional on hypothetical paths of monetary policy. A modest policy intervention is a change in policy that does not significantly shift agents' beliefs about policy regime and does not generate...

We construct linear projections of macro variables conditional on hypothetical paths of monetary policy, using as an example an identified VAR model. Hypothetical policies are restricted to ones where both the policy intervention and its impacts are consistent with history -- otherwise the...

In a discretionary regime the monetary authority can print more money and create more inflation than people expect. But, although these inflation surprises can have some benefits, they cannot arise systematically in equilibrium when people understand the policymaker's incentives and form their...

Natural-rate models suggest that the systematic parts of monetary policy will not have important consequences for the business cycle. Nevertheless, we often observe high and variable rates of monetary growth, and a tendency for monetary authorities to pursue countercyclical policies. This...

The Chinese economy has undergone three major phases: the 1978-1997 period marked as the SOE-led economy, the 1998-2015 phase as the investment-driven economy, and the new normal economy since 2016. All three economies have been shaped by the government's financial policies, defined as a set of...

Aggregate housing demand shocks are an important source of house price fluctuations in the standard macroeconomic models, and through the collateral channel, they drive macroeconomic fluctuations. These reduced-form shocks, however, fail to generate a highly volatile price-to-rent ratio that...

Using a novel database of domestic financial reforms in 90 countries over 1973-2014, we document that global financial liberalization followed an S-curve path: reforms were slow and gradual in early periods, accelerated during the 1990s, and slowed down after 2000. We estimate a learning model...

We document four facts about the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide relevant for those studying the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on COVID-19 transmission. First: across all countries and U.S. states that we study, the growth rates of daily deaths from COVID-19 fell from a wide...