Tag Archives: Fiscal theory of the price level

The Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control has published a special issue with the papers of the conference on “Fiscal and Monetary Policies” that the Study Center Gerzensee co-organized with the JEDC, the St. Louis Fed, the University of Bern, and the Swiss National Bank. This earlier post contains a link to the conference program.

Jointly with the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, the St. Louis Fed, the University of Bern and the Swiss National Bank, the Study Center Gerzensee organized a conference on Fiscal and Monetary Policies. The program can be viewed here.

In a recent Citigroup Global Economics View Research report, Willem Buiter discusses “Bad and Good ‘Fiscal Theories of the Price Level’.” Quoting my own work on the Fiscal Theory, Buiter warns that policy makers start to pay attention to the theory: It does not often happen that a rather obscure technical bit of economic theory merits an audience wider than the small band of academics who spend their waking hours pondering such matters because that is the kind of thing they do. This note...

In the Richmond Fed’s Econ Focus, Eric Leeper explains his views. Disparate confounding dynamics and simple policy rules: My view is that central banks have put far too many resources into understanding tiny fluctuations and too few resources into the things that actually matter. … Something like the basic Taylor rule doesn’t really serve as a useful litmus test for what policy is doing in the face of these DCDs, so it’s a little bizarre to me that a lot of central banks routinely calculate...

A conference at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute addressed the status of the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and the theory’s implications for current policy. Slides and papers are available on the conference website. Given that the conference was meant to resuscitate research on the FTPL and that the participants were selected accordingly, many contributions appear rather mainstream. Chris Sims worries about indeterminacy of the price level if monetary policy is...