Nominal Debt as a Fiscal Shock Absorber: Bringing Measurement to the Theory

这项拟议研究的主要目标是记录1790年至今政府债务的实际回报。为了实现这一点，调查人员将现有的关于每一种美国国库券、票据和债券的市场价格和未偿还数量的数据集扩展到共和国诞生时。这些数据将从个别报纸和美国财政部文件中手工收集。这样的数据集将使研究人员能够：(I)研究纳税人和债券持有人之间财政冲击风险分担的时间路径；(Ii)更好地将现代新古典最优货币和财政政策理论与数据联系起来；以及(Iii)构建联邦政府实际借款成本的时间序列。拟议的研究将产生三个广泛的影响。首先，它将有助于我们了解美国政府历来是如何管理其债务的。其次，它将生成一个关于美国财政部发行的每一种证券的数据库；这将对金融、公共财政和宏观经济学的研究界有用。第三，它将产生一种替代美国财政部制定的联邦债务实际成本的衡量标准。该项目的成果将通过工作文件和参加科学会议来传播。

The primary objective of the proposed research is to document the real returns to government debt from 1790 to the present. To accomplish this the investigator will extend an existing dataset on the market prices and the outstanding quantities of every U.S. Treasury bill, note and bond back to the birth of the republic. The data will be collected by hand from individual newspapers and U.S. Treasury documents. Such a dataset will allow the investigator to: (i) study the time path of risk sharing of fiscal shocks across taxpayers and bondholders; (ii) better connect modern neo-classical theories of optimal monetary and fiscal policy to data; and (iii) construct a time-series of the real borrowing costs to the Federal government.The proposed research will have three broad impacts. First, it will aid our understanding of how the U.S. government has historically managed its debt. Second, it will generate a database on every security issued by the U.S. Treasury; this will be useful to the research community in finance, public finance, and macroeconomics. Third, it will produce an alternative measure to one produced by the U.S. Treasury of the real cost of the federal debt. The results of this project will be disseminated through working papers and participation in scientific conferences.