"This paper provides an overview, using extensive documentary material, of developments in U.K. macroeconomic policy in the last half-century. Rather than focusing on well-known recent changes in policy arrangements (such as the introduction of inflation targeting in 1992 or central bank...

I study the implications of different institutional frameworks for the conduct of fiscal policy, under the assumption that the government cannot commit to future policy choices. The environments analyzed vary on whether the government is endowed with the ability to commit to beginning-of-period...

"Death of a Theory," presented in St. Louis. January 13, 2012.

"SNEAK PREVIEW: Death of a Theory." Presented at the Korea-America Economic Association, Chicago, Illinois. January 7, 2012.

Researchers have used cross-state differences to assess the jobs impact of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the Recovery Act). Existing studies find that the Act's broadly- directed spending (i.e. excluding tax cuts) increased employment, at a cost-per-job of roughly three to...

A key question that has arisen during recent debates is whether government spending multipliers are larger during times when resources are idle. This paper seeks to shed light on this question by analyzing new quarterly historical data covering multiple large wars and depressions in the U.S. and...

In this paper we study competition among non-benevolent local governments for mobile firms and evaluate the consequences of imposing alternative regimes of competition. In our model politicians act as regulators that offer incentives in the form of recommended output levels and socially-costly...

Policymakers often use measures of tax incidence (generational accounts) as criteria for policy selection. We use a quantitative model of optimal intergenerational policy to evaluate the ability of the tax incidence metric to capture the identity of recipients and contributors and the magnitudes...

In this paper we show that the generational accounting framework used in macroeconomics to measure tax incidence can, in some cases, yield inaccurate measurements of the tax burden across age cohorts. This result is very important for policy evaluation, because it shows that the selection of tax...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of altruism on the optimal fiscal policy. The existence of positive bequests links present and future generations in the economy. We show that these altruistic links provide a new role for indirect taxation (consumption and estate taxes) with important...