Evaluating Macroeconomic Stabilization Policy

过去几年，宏观经济稳定政策的设计发生了重要变化：所谓的“刺激检查”已成为财政政策工具包的重要组成部分，美联储已转向一个新的货币政策框架。这项研究开发了新的方法，使研究人员能够评估财政和货币稳定政策设计中此类变化的可能影响。新方法将结构性宏观经济建模与强大的经验基础结合起来，既利用了经典的时间序列，也利用了最近可用的横截面数据。这项研究的结果承诺改善对从高失业率到高通胀的宏观经济危机的政策反应。该奖项资助了三个关于宏观经济稳定政策评估的单独研究项目。第一个项目就经验主义宏观经济学家在实践中应如何估计政策干预的因果效应提出了建议。这项研究回顾了一大堆现有的方法，然后在一个丰富的、经验相关的设置中比较了它们的表现。第二个项目展示了如何结合对突击政策干预效果的经验估计，以预测如果系统的政策框架发生变化将会发生什么。重要的是，该项目以一种尊重卢卡斯批评的方式做到了这一点。研究人员使用这种方法来评估在宏观经济政策设计的其他假设下，美国经济将如何演变。第三个项目研究财政刺激。研究人员辩称，如果这种刺激措施没有伴随着未来相对较快的增税，那么刺激计划将通过更高的产出(增加基本盈余)和更高的通胀(侵蚀政府债务的实际价值)的组合来“为自己融资”，而这种分裂是由供应约束的严密性决定的。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The last couple of years have seen important changes in the design of macroeconomic stabilization policy: so-called "stimulus checks" have become an important part of the fiscal policy toolkit, and the Federal Reserve has moved to a new monetary policy framework. This research develops new methods to allow researchers to evaluate the likely impacts of such changes in fiscal and monetary stabilization policy design. The new methods combine structural macroeconomic modeling with a strong empirical grounding, leveraging both classical time-series as well as more recently available cross-sectional data. The results of this research promise to improve policy responses to macroeconomic crises, from high unemployment to high inflation.This award funds three separate research projects on the evaluation of macroeconomic stabilization policy. The first project provides recommendations on how empirical macroeconomists should in practice estimate the causal effects of policy interventions. The research reviews a large menu of existing approaches and then compares their performance in a rich, empirically relevant set-ting. The second project shows how to combine empirical estimates of the effects of surprise policy interventions to predict what would happen if the systematic policy framework were to change. Importantly, the project does so in a way that respects the Lucas critique. The researchers use the method to evaluate how the U.S. economy would have evolved under alternative assumptions on macroeconomic policy design. The third project studies fiscal stimulus. The re-searchers argue that, if such stimulus is not accompanied by relatively quick future tax hikes, then the stimulus will instead "finance itself" through a mix of higher output (increasing the primary surplus) and higher inflation (eroding the real value of government debt), with the split governed by the tightness of supply constraintsThis award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.