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Jel Classification:E62 

Working Paper
Escaping the Great Recession

While high uncertainty is an inherent implication of the economy entering the zero lower bound, deflation is not, because agents are likely to be uncertain about the way policymakers will deal with the large stock of debt arising from a severe recession. We draw this conclusion based on a new-Keynesian model in which the monetary/fiscal policy mix can change over time and zero-lower-bound episodes are recurrent. Given that policymakers? behavior is constrained at the zero lower bound, beliefs about the exit strategy play a key role. Announcing a period of austerity is detrimental in the short ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2014-17

Working Paper
What about Japan?

As a result of the BoJ's large-scale asset purchases, the consolidated Japanese government borrows mostly at the floating rate from households and invests in longer-duration risky assets to earn an extra 3% of GDP. We quantify the impact of Japan's low-rate policies on its government and households. Because of the duration mismatch on the government balance sheet, the government's fiscal space expands when real rates decline, allowing the government to keep its promises to older Japanese households. A typical younger Japanese household does not have enough duration in its portfolio to ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-028

Working Paper
Capital Taxation with Heterogeneous Discounting and Collateralized Borrowing

We study optimal long-run capital taxation in a closed economy with heterogeneity in agents' time-discount factors where borrowing is allowed but restricted by a collateral constraint. Financial frictions distort intertemporal optimization margins and the tax system serves a dual role: first, it is used to finance government consumption; second, it serves to alleviate the distortions arising from the binding collateral constraint. The discrepancy between the private and the social discount factors pushes for a subsidy on capital, while the discrepancy introduced by the collateral constraint ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2017-053

Working Paper
Political Connections, Allocation of Stimulus Spending, and the Jobs Multiplier

Using American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) data, we show that firms lever their political connections to win stimulus grants and public expenditure channeled through politically connected firms hinders job creation. We build a unique database that links campaign contributions and state legislative election outcomes to ARRA grant allocation. Using exogenous variation in political connections based on ex-post close elections held before ARRA, we causally show that politically connected firms are 64 percent more likely to secure a grant. Based on an instrumental variable approach, we ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2021-005

Working Paper
The Determination of Public Debt under both Aggregate and Idiosyncratic Uncertainty

We use an analytically tractable, heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets model to show that the Ramsey planner’s decision to finance stochastic public expenditures implies a departure from tax smoothing and an endogeneous mean-reverting force to support positive debt growth despite the government’s precautionary saving motives. Specifically, the government’s attempt to balance the competing incentives between its own precautionary saving (tax smoothing) and households’ precautionary saving (individual consumption smoothing)—even at the cost of extra tax distortion—implies an ...
Working Papers , Paper 2019-038

Working Paper
Did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Create Jobs and Stimulate Growth?

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 is the most extensive overhaul of the U.S. income tax code since the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Existing estimates of TCJA’s economic impact are based on economic projections using pre-TCJA estimates of tax effects. I exploit plausibly exogenous state-level variation in tax changes from TCJA and find that an income tax cut equaling 1 percent of GDP led to a 1.3 percentage point faster job growth and nearly 1.5 percentage points higher GDP growth. The impact on growth was the strongest in the year of the tax change, with much smaller effects in the ...
Working Papers , Paper 2001

Working Paper
Fiscal Multipliers at the Zero Lower Bound: The Role of Policy Inertia

The presence of the lagged shadow policy rate in the interest rate feedback rule reduces the government spending multiplier nontrivially when the policy rate is constrained at the zero lower bound (ZLB). In the economy with policy inertia, increased inflation and output due to higher government spending during a recession speed up the return of the policy rate to the steady state after the recession ends. This in turn dampens the expansionary effects of the government spending during the recession via expectations. In our baseline calibration, the output multiplier at the ZLB is 2.5 when the ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2014-107

Working Paper
Optimal time-consistent government debt maturity

The current literature on a government's optimal debt maturity structure contends that by purchasing short-term assets and selling long-term debt, it is possible to fully insulate the economy against fiscal shocks. The required short and long positions are large relative to GDP and constant. The market value of debt adjusts automatically and the constant debt positions and fluctuating bond prices insulate against potential shocks. However, achieving the goal of averting future shocks depends on the government perfectly committing to the future fiscal policy, for without this sustained ...
Working Papers , Paper 16-4

Working Paper
Time-Inconsistent Optimal Quantity of Debt

A key feature of the infinite-horizon heterogeneous-agents incomplete-markets (Inf-HAIM) framework is that the equilibrium interest rate of public debt lies below the time discount rate (regardless of capital). This happens because of a positive liquidity premium on asset returns due to imperfect risk sharing. This fundamental property of standard Inf-HAIM models, however, implies that the Ramsey planner's fiscal policy may be time-inconsistent---because the planner has a dominate incentive to issue plenty of debt such that all households are fully self-insured against idiosyncratic risk ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-037

Working Paper
Vocational Considerations and Trends in Social Security Disability

Along with health, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) evaluates work-limiting disability by considering vocational factors including age, education, and past work experience. As the number of SSDI applicants and awards has increased, these vocational criteria are increasingly important to acceptances and denials. A unique state-level dataset allows us to estimate how these factors relate to the SSDI award process. These estimates are used to asses how changes to the demographic and occupational composition have contributed to awards trends. In our results, the prevalence of workers ...
Working Papers , Paper 2016-18

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