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Over the past four decades, government debt as a fraction of GDP has been on an upward trajectory in advanced economies, approaching levels not reached since World War II. While normative macroeconomic theories can explain the increase in the level of debt in certain periods as a response to macroeconomic shocks, they cannot explain the broad-based long-run trend in debt accumulation. In contrast, political economy theories can explain the long-run trend as resulting from an aging population, rising political polarization, and rising electoral uncertainty across advanced economies. These theories emphasize the time-inconsistency in government policymaking, and thus the need for fiscal rules that restrict policymakers. Fiscal rules trade off commitment to not overspend and flexibility to react to shocks. This tradeoff guides design features of optimal rules, such as information dependence, enforcement, cross-country coordination, escape clauses, and instrument versus target criteria.

I examine the impact of alternative monetary policy rules on a rational asset price bubble, through the lens of an overlapping generations model with nominal rigidities. A systematic increase in interest rates in response to a growing bubble is shown to enhance the fluctuations in the latter, through its positive effect on bubble growth. The optimal monetary policy seeks to strike a balance between stabilization of the bubble and stabilization of aggregate demand. The paper's main findings call into question the theoretical foundations of the case for \"leaning against the wind\" monetary policies.

Governments are present-biased toward spending. Fiscal rules are deficit limits that trade off commitment to not overspend and flexibility to react to shocks. We compare coordinated rules, chosen jointly by a group of countries, to uncoordinated rules. If governments’ present bias is small, coordinated rules are tighter than uncoordinated rules: individual countries do not internalize the redistributive effect of interest rates. However, if the bias is large, coordinated rules are slacker: countries do not internalize the disciplining effect of interest rates. Surplus limits enhance welfare, and increased savings by some countries or outside economies can hurt the rest.

Recent reforms have given regulators broad powers to “bail-in” bank creditors during financial crises. We analyze efficient bail-ins and their implementation. To preserve liquidity, regulators must avoid signaling negative private information to creditors. Therefore, optimal bail-ins in bad times only depend on public information. As a result, the optimal policy cannot be implemented if regulators have wide discretion, due to an informational time-inconsistency problem. Rules mandating tough bail-ins after bad public signals, or contingent convertible (co-co) bonds, improve welfare. We further show that bail-in and bailout policies are complementary: if bailouts are possible, then discretionary bail-ins are more effective.

We ask whether fiscal rules constrain incumbents from using fiscal policy tools for reelection purposes. Using data on fiscal rules provided by the IMF for a sample of 77 (advanced and developing) countries over the 1984–2015 period, we find that strong fiscal rules dampen political budget cycles. Our results are remarkably robust against inclusion of media freedom and the level of government debt as explanatory variables. Furthermore, we find a strong effect of fiscal rules in, amongst others, countries with fewer veto players, left-wing governments, established democracies, and more globalized economies. In addition, the effect of fiscal rules on political budget cycles seems to be stronger after the global financial crisis, reflecting post-crisis expansion in the number of countries with strong fiscal rules, notably in the European Union.

This paper proposes a theory of the fiscal foundations of inflation based on imperfect knowledge and learning. Because imperfect knowledge breaks Ricardian equivalence, the scale and composition of the public debt matter for inflation. High and moderate duration debt generates wealth effects on consumption demand that impairs the intertemporal substitution channel of monetary policy: aggressive monetary policy is required to anchor inflation expectations. Counterfactual experiments conducted in an estimated model reveal that the US economy would have been substantially more volatile over the Great Inflation and Great Moderation periods if US debt levels had been those observed in Italy or Japan.

Should the generosity of unemployment benefits and the progressivity of income taxes depend on the presence of business cycles? This paper proposes a tractable model where there is a role for social insurance against uninsurable shocks to income and unemployment, as well as business cycles that are inefficient due to the presence of matching frictions and nominal rigidities. We derive an augmented Baily–Chetty formula showing that the optimal generosity of the social insurance system depends on a macroeconomic stabilization term. This term pushes for an increase in generosity when the level of economic activity is more responsive to social programmes in recessions than in booms. A calibration to the US economy shows that taking concerns for macroeconomic stabilization into account substantially raises the optimal unemployment insurance replacement rate but has a negligible impact on the optimal progressivity of the income tax. More generally, the role of social insurance programmes as automatic stabilizers affects their optimal design.

Most fiscal rules can be overridden by consensus. We show that this does not make them ineffectual. Since fiscal rules determine the outside option in case of disagreement, the opposition uses them as “bargaining chips” to obtain spending concessions. We show that under some conditions this political bargain mitigates the debt-accumulation problem. We analyse various rules and find that when political polarization is high, harsh fiscal rules (e.g. government shutdown) maximize the opposition’s bargaining power and lead to lower debt accumulation. When polarization is low, less strict fiscal limits (e.g. balanced-budget rule) are preferable. Moreover, we find that the optimal fiscal rules could arise in equilibrium by negotiation. Finally, by insuring against power fluctuations, negotiable rules yield higher welfare than hard ones.

At odds with the large literature devoted to the fiscal discipline effects of fiscal rules, only few contributions investigate their impact on public spending. Using a large sample of 185 countries, estimations based on the entropy balancing method reveal the following causal effects: fiscal rules significantly reduce total public spending and public consumption, leave public investment mostly unaffected, and increase the public investment-to-public consumption ratio. Moreover, the type of fiscal rule and countries' level of economic development influence the way fiscal rules affect public spending. Lastly, fiscal rules' features seem to be a major driving force of the way governments change public spending-and, notably, total spending and public investment-in response to the adoption of fiscal rules. Consequently, the public investment decline during recent times should mostly be attributable to other things but fiscal rules (which sometimes even raise public investment); and increased attention should be given to the various fiscal rules' features, which may enforce or, on the contrary, weaken their fiscal discipline performances.

Abstract We analyse discretionary fiscal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We distinguish policies for three phases of the pandemic: (1) acute overall disruption, (2) initial recovery phase and (3) the longer term. We analyse measures already taken in (1) and consider measures relevant for (2). We distinguish between lump-sum subsidies, such as deferral of tax payments, which may ease financial constraints, and measures which intentionally affect incentives. We also identify factors that are important given the short-term nature of the measures.