While popular wisdom holds that the United States should save more now in anticipation of the aging of the baby boom generation, the optimal response to population aging from a macroeconomic perspective is not clear-cut. Indeed, Cutler, Poterba, Sheiner, and Summers ("CPSS",1990) argued that the...

This paper provides an introduction to the practice of forecasting "exogenous" components of federal government taxes and spending-policy actions, for short--in the United States. First, we estimate simple models of defense expenditures that are useful for constructing current-quarter forecasts...

Both the OECD and the IMF periodically estimate and publish measures of fiscal impulse to gauge the extent to which fiscal policy in the major industrial countries has become more or less expansive over time. This paper compares these measures analytically and numerically. The paper shows that...

This paper reviews empirical evidence about the effects of changes in U.S. monetary policy and fiscal policy that has been accumulated during recent years in a series of collaborative research projects involving a variety of global macroeconometric models. The paper also considers, in...

Coordination of macroeconomic policy has been a major topic at recent summit meetings, and has been the subject of a number of theoretical studies. However, relatively little empirical research exists on policy coordination. This paper is an attempt to help fill this gap. The paper considers the...