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COVID-19: Which Workers Face the Highest Unemployment Risk?
Some 46% of U.S. workers are employed in occupations at “high risk” of layoff due to COVID-19 measures. How much could it cost to offset their lost income?
Working Paper
Flight to Liquidity or Safety? Recent Evidence from the Municipal Bond Market
We examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent monetary and fiscal policy actions on municipal bond market pricing. Using high-frequency trading data, we estimate key policy events at the peak of the crisis by focusing on a sample of bonds within a narrow window before and after each policy event. We find that policy interventions, in particular those with explicit credit backstops, were effective in alleviating municipal bond market stress. Next, we exploit daily variation in traded municipal bonds and virus exposure across U.S. counties. We find a shift in how bond investors ...
How Quickly Does Fiscal Policy Get Implemented?
The response to the 2007-09 recession can provide a sense of timing when it comes to implementing fiscal policy.
Working Paper
Optimal Credit Market Policy
We study optimal credit market policy in a stochastic, quantitative, general equilibrium, infinite-horizon economy with collateral constraints tied to housing prices. Collateral constraints yield a competitive equilibrium that is Pareto inefficient. Taxing housing in good states and subsidizing it in recessions leads to a Pareto-improving allocation for borrowers and savers. Quantitatively, the welfare gains afforded by the optimal tax are significant. The optimal tax reduces the covariance of collateral prices with consumption, and, by doing so, it increases asset prices on average, thus ...
Briefing
Is Fiscal Austerity Good for the Economy?
Concerns about fiscal imbalances in Europe and the United States have led to intense debates about whether governments should dramatically cut spending or increase taxes to reduce government debt ? a course of action often called fiscal "austerity." But is austerity likely to hurt economic growth? That question has not been definitively answered ? but even if austerity is costly in the short run, it may provide long-run benefits.
Briefing
Learning about Fiscal Policy Uncertainty
In response to the financial crisis and recession of 2007-09, the federal government enacted a number of emergency fiscal policies intended to aid recovery. These included short-term stimulus measures, such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and temporary tax reductions, such as the payroll tax cut in 2010. However, the unconventional and transitory nature of these fiscal policies may have contributed to greater economic uncertainty. Given the slow recovery that has followed the recession, economists are studying how such uncertainty might impact growth.
Working Paper
The Dynamic Effects of Personal and Corporate Income Tax Changes in the United States: Reply to Jentsch and Lunsford
In this reply to a comment by Jentsch and Lunsford, we show that, when focusing on the relevant impulse responses, the evidence for economic and statistically significant macroeconomic effects of tax changes in Mertens and Ravn (2013) remains present for a range of asymptotically valid inference methods.
Working Paper
On the optimal design of transfers and income-tax progressivity
We study the optimal design of means-tested transfers and progressive income taxes. In a simple analytical model, we demonstrate an optimally negative relation between transfers and income-tax progressivity due to efficiency and redistribution concerns. In a rich dynamic model, we quantify the optimal plan with flexible tax-and-transfer functions. Transfers should be larger than currently in the U.S. and financed with moderate income-tax progressivity. Transfers are key to implement higher progressivity in average than in marginal tax-and-transfer rates, achieving redistribution while ...
Working Paper
Trade policies and fiscal devaluations
Fiscal devaluations—an increase in import tariffs and export subsidies (IX) or an increase in value-added taxes and payroll subsidies (VP)—have been shown to provide as much stimulus under fixed exchange rates as a currency devaluation. We find that if agents expect policies to be reversed and the tax pass-through is large, VP is contractionary and IX provides a modest boost. In our medium-scale DSGE model, both features are crucial in accounting for Germany’s underperformance in response to VP in 2007. These findings cast doubt on fiscal devaluations as a cyclical stabilization tool ...