In the early postwar years, during the heyday of fiscal fine-tuning, monetary policy was not widely considered a particularly interesting or important topic. The predominant view was that the main function of monetary policy was to “stimulate” debt-financed purchases by keeping interest rates low. Inflation was first considered a useful lubricant to be traded for lower unemployment, and inflati...

Under EMU,monetary policy is oriented towards union-wide economic conditions, and cannot effectively address country-specific macroeconomic disturbances. Should national fiscal policy be used more actively, for stabilizing individual economies, now that exchange rate changes among member countries are no longer possible? Several recent studies answer this important normative question, based on ...

Worldwide monetary and fiscal policies in the past few years have put into sharp relief the fundamental tradeoff between short-run stabilization and long-run sustainability that policymakers face. The paper is organized around this question: How do the effects of routine monetary and fiscal operations designed to achieve macroeconomic stabilization objectives change when the economy moves from ...

We study the monetary instrument problem in a model of optimal discretionary fiscal and monetary policy. The policy problem is cast as a dynamic game between the central bank, the fiscal authority, and the private sector. We show that, as long as there is a conflict of interest between the two policy-makers, the central bank’s monetary instrument choice critically affects the Markov-perfect Nas...

This paper investigate the stabilization bias that arises in a model of non-cooperative monetary and fiscal policy stabilisation of the economy, when monetary authority implements price level targeting but fiscal policy remains benevolent. We demonstrate the gain in welfare improvement depends on the level of steady state debt. If the steady state level of the government debt is low, then the m...