Eric M. Leeper of Department of Economics, University of Virginia reviews “A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021” by Alan S. Blinder. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Examines monetary and fiscal policy in the United States since the 1960s, chronicling how stabilization policy struggled to fight recessions, unemployment, and inflation.”

Farmer, Waggoner, and Zha (2009) (FWZ) show that a new Keynesian model with regime-switching monetary policy can support multiple solutions, appearing to contradict findings in Davig and Leeper (2007) (DL). The explanation is straightforward: FWZ derive solutions using a model that differs from the one to which the DL conditions apply. The FWZ solutions also require that the exogenous driving process is a function of private and policy parameters. This undermines the sharp distinctions among “deep parameters” typical of optimizing models and makes it difficult to ascribe economic interpretations to FWZ's additional solutions. (E12, E31, E43, E52)

The paper generalizes the Taylor principle—the proposition that central banks can stabilize the macroeconomy by raising their interest rate instrument more than one-for-one in response to higher inflation—to an environment in which reaction coefficients in the monetary policy rule change regime, evolving according to a Markov process. We derive a long-run Taylor principle which delivers unique bounded equilibria in two standard models. Policy can satisfy the Taylor principle in the long run, even while deviating from it substantially for brief periods or modestly for prolonged periods. Macroeconomic volatility can be higher in periods when the Taylor principle is not satisfied, not because of indeterminacy, but because monetary policy amplifies the impacts of fundamental shocks. Regime change alters the qualitative and quantitative predictions of a conventional new Keynesian model, yielding fresh interpretations of existing empirical work.

It is currently popular to identify monetary policy shocks with innovations in some measure of reserves or in the federal funds rate. These assumptions about the interest elasticity of the supply of or demand for reserves imply monetary policy shocks that produce dynamic responses of macroeconomic variables that are anomalous relative to traditional monetary analyses. This paper tentatively identifies supply and demand shocks in the markets for reserves and M2 for the 1980s and contrasts them with results for the 1970s. In the later period, identified monetary policy shocks have dynamic impacts that are fully consistent with traditional analyses.

Fiscal foresight --the phenomenon that legislative and implementation lags ensure that private agents receive clear signals about the tax rates they face in the future --is intrinsic to the tax policy process.This paper develops an analytical framework to study the econometric implications of fiscal foresight.Simple theoretical examples show that foresight produces equilibrium time series with nonfundamental representations, which misalign the agents' and the econometrician's information sets.Economically meaningful shocks to taxes, therefore, cannot generally be extracted from statistical innovations in conventional ways.Econometric analyses that fail to align agents' and the econometrician's information sets can produce distorted inferences about the effects of tax policies.The paper documents the sensitivity of econometric inferences of tax effects to details about how tax information flows into the economy.We show that alternative assumptions about the information flows that give rise to fiscal foresight can reconcile the diverse empirical findings in the literature on anticipated tax changes.

It is currently popular to identify monetary policy shocks with innovations in some measure of reserves or in the federal funds rate. These assumptions about the interest elasticity of the supply of or demand for reserves imply monetary policy shocks that produce dynamic responses of macroeconomic variables that are anomalous relative to traditional monetary analyses. This paper tentatively identifies supply and demand shocks in the markets for reserves and M2 for the 1980s and contrasts them with results for the 1970s. In the later period, identified monetary policy shocks have dynamic impacts that are fully consistent with traditional analyses.

We quantify government spending multipliers in US data using Bayesian prior and posterior analysis of a monetary model with fiscal details and two distinct monetary-fiscal policy regimes. The combination of model specification, observable data, and relatively diffuse priors for some parameters lands posterior estimates in regions of the parameter space that yield fresh perspectives on the transmission mechanisms that underlie government spending multipliers. Short-run output multipliers are comparable across regimes—posterior means around 1.3 on impact—but much larger after 10 years under passive money/active fiscal than under active money/passive fiscal—90 percent credible sets of [1.5, 1.9] versus [0.1, 0.4] in present value, when estimated from 1955 to 2016.