Over the last decade, empirical studies analyzing macroeconomic conditions that may affect the size of government spending multipliers have flourished. Yet, in spite of their obvious public policy importance, little is known about public investment multipliers. In particular, the clear...

This paper studies the time-series behavior of a set of widely-used social indicators and uncovers two important stylized facts. First, not all social indicators are created equal in terms of the importance of cyclical fluctuations. While some social indicators such as the unemployment rate and...

We estimate the effect of worldwide tax changes on output following the narrative approach developed for the United States by Romer and Romer (2010). We use a novel dataset on value-added taxes for 51 countries (21 industrial and 30 developing) for the period 1970-2014 to identify 96 tax...

Over the last decade, empirical studies analyzing macroeconomic conditions that may affect the size of government spending multipliers have flourished. Yet, in spite of their obvious public policy importance, little is known about public investment multipliers. In particular, the clear...

What is the relationship between interest rates and the exchange rate? The empirical literature in this area has been inconclusive. We use an optimizing model of a small open economy to rationalize the mixed empirical findings. The model has three key margins. First, higher domestic interest...

Intro -- Contents -- Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I Monetary and Exchange Rate Policy in Theory -- 1 Pricing-to-Market, the Interest-Rate Rule, and the Exchange Rate -- 2 Optimal Exchange RateRegimes: Turning Mundell-Fleming's Dictum on Its Head -- 3 Monetary Policy Rules,...

To explain the fact that government spending and tax policy are procyclical in emerging and developing countries, we develop a model for the joint behavior of optimal tax rates and government spending over the business cycle. Our set-up relies on financial frictions, which have been shown to be...

A famous dictum in open economy macroeconomics -- which obtains in the Mundell-Fleming world of sticky prices and perfect capital mobility -- holds that the choice of the optimal exchange rate regime should depend on the type of shock hitting the economy. If shocks are predominantly real, a...