Anticipated stimulus policies enacted perhaps in response to a crisis can motivate precautionary behaviour during the preceding expansion. Ex post stimulus can be ex ante prudential. Prudential fiscal stimulus both speeds up economic recoveries, and prevents crises from occurring in the first...

We develop a simple and intuitive approach for analytically deriving unconditionally optimal (UO) policies, a topic of enduring interest in optimal monetary policy analysis. The approach can be employed to both general linear-quadratic problems and to the underlying non-linear environments. We...