Separating seasonal components from other sources of economic fluctuations is crucial for both economic modeling and policy making. Practitioners treat seasonality as noise to be removed before estimating models and tend to apply deseasonalizing methods i

We provide an introduction to optimal fiscal and monetary policy using the primal approach to optimal taxation. We use this approach to address how fiscal and monetary policy should be set over the long run and over the business cycle. We find four substantive lessons for policymaking: Capital...