This is an applications-oriented text that demystifies the linkages between monetary and fiscal policies and key macroeconomic variables such as income, unemployment, inflation and interest rates. Specially written "newspaper" articles simulate current macroeconomic news on asset-price bubbles, exchange rates, hyperinflation and more. Exercises and diagrams, and a global perspective – incorporating both developed and emerging economies - make this a broadly useful, real-world oriented text on a complex and shifting subject.

The recent recession has brought fiscal policy back to the forefront, with economists and policy makers struggling to reach a consensus on highly political issues like tax rates and government spending. At the heart of the debate are fiscal multipliers, whose size and sensitivity determine the power of such policies to influence economic growth. Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis focuses on the effects of fiscal stimuli and increased government spending, with contributions that consider the measurement of the multiplier effect and its size. In the face of uncertainty over the sustainability of recent economic policies, further contributions to this volume discuss the merits of alternate means of debt reduction through decreased government spending or increased taxes. A final section examines how the short-term political forces driving fiscal policy might be balanced with aspects of the long-term planning governing monetary policy. A direct intervention in timely debates, Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis offers invaluable insights about various responses to the recent financial crisis.

The sizeable increase in income inequality experienced in advanced economies and many parts of the world since the 1990s and the severe consequences of the global economic and financial crisis have brought distributional issues to the top of the policy agenda. The challenge for many governments is to address concerns over rising inequality while simultaneously promoting economic efficiency and more robust economic growth. The book delves into this discussion by analyzing fiscal policy and its link with inequality. Fiscal policy is the government’s most powerful tool for addressing inequality. It affects households ‘consumption directly (through taxes and transfers) and indirectly (via incentives for work and production and the provision of public goods and individual services such as education and health). An important message of the book is that growth and equity are not necessarily at odds; with the appropriate mix of policy instruments and careful policy design, countries can in many cases achieve better distributional outcomes and improve economic efficiency. Country studies (on the Netherlands, China, India, Republic of Congo, and Brazil) demonstrate the diversity of challenges across countries and their differing capacity to use fiscal policy for redistribution. The analysis presented in the book builds on and extends work done at the IMF, and also includes contributions from leading academics.

This is an applications-oriented text that demystifies the linkages between monetary and fiscal policies and key macroeconomic variables such as income, unemployment, inflation and interest rates. Specially written "newspaper" articles simulate current macroeconomic news on asset-price bubbles, exchange rates, hyperinflation and more. Exercises and diagrams, and a global perspective – incorporating both developed and emerging economies - make this a broadly useful, real-world oriented text on a complex and shifting subject.

Recently, monetary authorities have increasingly focused on implementing policies to ensure price stability and strengthen central bank independence. Simultaneously, in the fiscal area, market development has allowed public debt managers to focus more on cost minimization. This “divorce” of monetary and debt management functions in no way lessens the need for effective coordination of monetary and fiscal policy if overall economic performance is to be optimized and maintained in the long term. This paper analyzes these issues based on a review of the relevant literature and of country experiences from an institutional and operational perspective.

In Monetary and Fiscal Policy Through a DSGE Lens, Harold L. Cole develops and extends versions of a classic quantitative model of economic growth to take on a wide range of topics in monetary and fiscal policy. Bridging the gap between current undergraduate and graduate texts in the field, this comprehensive book covers the basic elements of advanced macroeconomics and equips readers to understand the debate on key policy questions. By using the simple DSGE, or dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, framework to build a series of quantitative models, the book combines a gradual introduction to advanced analytic methods with computer programming and quantitative policy analysis. In a clear discussion of the sophisticated interaction between theory and data, Cole explains how to gauge how well a model captures key elements in the data and how to reverse engineer a model to data. The book covers costs of inflation, optimal monetary policy, the impact of labor and capital taxes, and optimal fiscal policy. It systematically discusses technical material including the new Keynesian liquidity shock models, standard analytic methods, such as Lagrangian methods, and computational methods using Matlab and Python. With a strong computational emphasis, the volume teaches how to program up and solve systems of non-linear equations and develop models to study the macroeconomy. Knowing how to deeply understand and analyze models and develop computational code to evaluate the implications of those models is essential for students of macroeconomics. This book connects the standard undergraduate material to the elaborate models of advanced graduate courses with systematic and logical coverage of the basics of advanced modern macroeconomics.