Donna Faye E. Bajaro , Jaqueson K. Galimberti , Irfan A. Qureshi
{"title":"Monetary policy under fiscal stress: A forward-looking analysis of fiscal dominance","authors":"Donna Faye E. Bajaro , Jaqueson K. Galimberti , Irfan A. Qureshi","doi":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103701","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103701","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Subdued economic activity and low tax revenues, especially during crises, drive borrowing and increase public debt. Central banks may face pressure to deviate from policy targets during these periods to ease the debt burden. Under fiscal dominance, debt sustainability relies on low interest rates and high inflation rather than consolidation. This paper empirically tests the presence of fiscal dominance using forward-looking Taylor rules and data from 52 countries over three decades. The results detect fiscal dominance, with stronger effects in “de jure” inflation-targeting emerging economies with low central bank independence, especially those without debt rules and with high debt-to-GDP ratios. Emerging economies with high foreign currency-denominated debt are further affected by exchange rate debt valuation effects, and fiscal dominance leads their central banks to follow exchange rate stabilization policies. Since 2022–23, interest rate responses to fiscal imbalances have strengthened, posing challenges for future policy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47863,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Macroeconomics","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 103701"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144860630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Does monetary policy impact innovation? Evidence from Australian Administrative Data","authors":"Omer Majeed , Jonathan Hambur , Robert Breunig","doi":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103706","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103706","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We examine whether monetary policy affects innovative activity and productivity in Australia. As a small open economy that primarily imports and adopts existing technology, research on Australia complements previous research on the United States. While contractionary policy reduces aggregate research and development spending, and in turn productivity, the effects appear more short-lived compared to the United States. When using survey measures of innovation that capture adoption, we find heterogenous responses. Small firms decrease innovation in response to contractionary monetary policy shocks, whereas large firms increase innovation. This heterogeneity may reflect differing exposures to the demand and financial constraint channels of monetary policy. United States monetary policy affects Australian firms’ innovation, at least in part by influencing global economic conditions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47863,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Macroeconomics","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 103706"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144880076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Monetary regimes and regional economies: A counterfactual perspective from two euro opt-outs","authors":"Sang-Wook (Stanley) Cho , Sally Wong","doi":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103700","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103700","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper investigates the counterfactual impact of an alternative monetary regime on regional income and disparity within Denmark and Sweden, two EU countries that opted out of the euro at its introduction in 1999, using the synthetic control method. Our findings reveal that counterfactual income trajectories would have been highly heterogeneous: while most Danish regions would have experienced modest losses or gains, some Swedish regions might have recorded lower income levels under the counterfactual, although the evidence is mixed and concentrated in a small number of non-capital regions. We further analyze these outcomes in light of standard theories of monetary unions, finding that regions more open to trade and with greater capital intensity would have been more likely to benefit. Finally, we assess the implications for regional inequality, showing that the current monetary regime was associated with reduced regional income disparities in Denmark and produced mixed effects in Sweden.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47863,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Macroeconomics","volume":"85 ","pages":"Article 103700"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144809744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What caused the post-pandemic inflation in France? An analysis using the Bernanke–Blanchard model","authors":"Pierre Aldama , Hervé Le Bihan , Claire Le Gall","doi":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103699","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103699","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We analyse post-pandemic inflation in France using the Bernanke–Blanchard semi-structural model of wage and price inflation. This model builds on a wage Phillips curve, a mark-up price-setting equation and adaptive equations for short- and long-run inflation expectations. Wage and price inflation as well as inflation expectations are modelled as functions of a labour market slack indicator (the vacancies-to-unemployed ratio), energy and food price shocks, a measure of supply-chain disruptions (“shortages”) and other exogenous factors (trend productivity, Covid lockdowns/re-openings). We estimate the model from the 1990s to 2023Q2 and derive impulse response functions and historical decomposition of endogenous variables during the pandemic era. As BB for the US, we find that the main driver of the post-pandemic inflation was the energy price shocks at first, followed by the food price shocks. Labour market conditions initially played a minor role in inflation, although the substantial increase in wage inflation observed between 2021Q4 and 2023Q2 can be attributed predominantly to the tightening of the labour market.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47863,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Macroeconomics","volume":"85 ","pages":"Article 103699"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144713457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Identifying monetary policy shocks through external constraints","authors":"Francesco Fusari","doi":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103696","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103696","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper proposes a new strategy for the identification of monetary policy shocks in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs). It combines sign restrictions on the impulse responses with external constraints on high-frequency surprises and central bank’s macroeconomic projections. I use this approach to evaluate the transmission of US monetary policy over the period 1965–2007. First, I find that contractionary monetary policy shocks unequivocally decrease output, sharpening the ambiguous implications of standard sign-restricted SVARs. Second, I show that these findings, differently from those obtained under alternative methodologies, remain valid even when inference is performed using a prior-robust Bayesian algorithm. Furthermore, my identification strategy is successful in recovering monetary shocks and monetary policy equations that are coherent, respectively, with narrative sign restrictions and restrictions on the systematic component of monetary policy. Finally, I show that this framework ensures great flexibility and is particularly convenient for the joint identification of monetary policy and central bank information shocks.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47863,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Macroeconomics","volume":"85 ","pages":"Article 103696"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144653089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lilia Cavallari , Stefano D’Addona , Paolo Porchia
{"title":"Demand, wealth inequality and the business cycle","authors":"Lilia Cavallari , Stefano D’Addona , Paolo Porchia","doi":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103693","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103693","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We consider a flexible price continuous-time DSGE model of a closed economy populated by heterogeneous households subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic income risk and aggregate TFP shocks. The economy produces a variety of imperfectly substitutable final goods. Our main innovation is a rich representation of household consumption and saving behavior allowing for a time-varying elasticity of substitution across varieties. Specifically, we consider a utility function displaying Increasing Elasticity of Substitution (IES). We provide a convenient approach to handle the complex dynamic programming problem implied by income heterogeneity, aggregate shocks and non-homothetic preferences. We show that IES preferences help to replicate important features of the wealth distribution observed in the data together with a plausible macroeconomic dynamics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47863,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Macroeconomics","volume":"85 ","pages":"Article 103693"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144663341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corporate finance and interest rate policy","authors":"Alessandro Piergallini","doi":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103698","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103698","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>I develop flexible- and sticky-price general equilibrium models that embody endogenous corporate financing decisions affecting firm value due to distortionary taxes. Nominal interest-rate variations impact the costs of debt and equity capital asymmetrically and thereby induce firms to modify the financial structure, altering the gap between the optimization-based weighted average cost of capital and the real interest rate. Under these circumstances, I characterize conditions under which rules-based monetary policies that set the nominal interest rate as an increasing function of the inflation rate induce aggregate stability in the form of a unique stable equilibrium. In contrast to what is commonly argued, I demonstrate that both passive interest rate policies, which underreact to inflation, and mildly active interest rate policies, which overreact to inflation but below a threshold reflecting both tax and capital structures, ensure determinacy of equilibrium. Conversely, excessively aggressive inflation-fighting monetary actions are destabilizing in the presence of price stickiness by generating either multiple equilibria or the nonexistence of stable equilibria. Under the stabilizing monetary regimes, I prove that macroeconomic dynamics following either interest rate normalization or temporary monetary tightening critically depend upon the tax code and the steady-state debt-equity ratio.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47863,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Macroeconomics","volume":"85 ","pages":"Article 103698"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144631678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Leading patent breadth, endogenous quality choice, and economic growth","authors":"Keishun Suzuki, Shin Kishimoto","doi":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103697","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103697","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>O’Donoghue and Zweimüller (2004, J. Econ. Growth 9(1), 81-123), a seminal work, showed that broadening leading breadth in patent protection can stimulate innovation. However, the empirical literature has consistently found skeptical results on the positive effect. To fill the gap, we build another framework where the quality improvement size is derived as an interior solution. In our model, broadening leading breadth can negatively affect innovation because each innovator is incentivized to <em>free-ride</em> the other innovators’ quality improvements. As a further analysis, we quantitatively investigate the growth effect of intervention in patent licensing negotiations using two different profit division rules derived from a cooperative game. We find that intervention in patent licensing negotiations increases the growth rate and stabilizes the economy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47863,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Macroeconomics","volume":"85 ","pages":"Article 103697"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144581175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Asserting independence: Optimal monetary policy when the central bank and political authority disagree","authors":"Justin Svec, Daniel L. Tortorice","doi":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103694","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103694","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper solves for optimal monetary policy when households face uncertainty about whether the central bank is independent from the political authority. In our model an independent central bank maximizes its own preferences while a dependent central bank maximizes the preferences of the political authority. Households form beliefs regarding the likelihood that the central bank is independent and update these beliefs using Bayes” rule given the observed choice of interest rate. The central bank takes into account how its policy choice influences household beliefs. We find that the central bank suffers losses when it is perceived to be captured, leading the central bank to deviate from traditional optimal policy under rational expectations to demonstrate its independence to the households.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47863,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Macroeconomics","volume":"85 ","pages":"Article 103694"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144596240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Joel Alcedo , Alberto Cavallo , Prachi Mishra , Antonio Spilimbergo
{"title":"Back to trend: COVID effects on E-commerce in 44 countries","authors":"Joel Alcedo , Alberto Cavallo , Prachi Mishra , Antonio Spilimbergo","doi":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103682","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103682","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study online spending shares in 44 economies and 26 industries during the COVID-19 pandemic, using online transaction data from Mastercard. The online shares of total credit card transactions surged during the pandemic during lockdowns, but since returned to pre-pandemic trends in most countries. The differences between countries are strongly correlated with the mobility and fiscal measures. There is little evidence of permanent structural changes in e-commerce spending patterns. Finally, we estimate that COVID-19-related restrictions on in-person spending imposed average welfare costs of 7 percent.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47863,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Macroeconomics","volume":"85 ","pages":"Article 103682"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144314227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}