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"News--or foresight--about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non-fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react. Using tax policies as a leading example of foresight, simple theory makes transparent the economic behavior and information structures that generate non-fundamental equilibria. Econometric analyses that fail to model foresight will obtain biased estimates of output multipliers for taxes; biases are quantitatively important when two canonical theoretical models are taken as data generating processes. Both the nature of equilibria and the inferences about the effects of anticipated tax changes hinge critically on hypothesized tax information flows. Differential U.S. federal tax treatment of municipal and treasury bonds embeds news about future taxes in bond yield spreads. Including that measure of tax news in identified VARs produces substantially different inferences about the macroeconomic impacts of anticipated taxes"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"Aging populations in advanced economies are placing ever-increasing demands on government spending in the form of old-age benefits. Economies that have promised substantially more benefits than they have made provision to finance are heading into a prolonged era of fiscal stress. Unresolved fiscal stress raises the possibility that the economies will hit their fiscal limits where taxes and spending no longer adjust to stabilize debt. In such economies, monetary policy may lose its ability to control inflation and influence the economy in the usual ways. The paper discusses models of fiscal limits and their implications and lays out a research agenda to integrate political economy and empirical considerations with general equilibrium models of monetary and fiscal interactions"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"Monetary policy decisions tend to be based on systematic analysis of alternative policy choices and their associated macroeconomic impacts: this is science. Fiscal policy choices, in contrast, spring from unsystematic speculation, grounded more in politics than economics: this is alchemy. In normal times, fiscal alchemy poses no insurmountable problems for monetary policy because fiscal expectations can be extrapolated from past fiscal behavior. But normal times may be coming to an end: aging populations are causing promised government old-age benefits to grow relentlessly and many governments have no plans for financing the benefits. In this era of fiscal stress, fiscal expectations are unanchored and fiscal alchemy creates unnecessary uncertainty and can undermine the ability of monetary policy to control inflation and influence real economic activity in the usual ways"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site