Evaluating Macroeconomic Stabilization Policy

过去几年，宏观经济稳定政策的设计发生了重大变化：所谓的“刺激支票”已成为财政政策工具包的重要组成部分，美联储已转向新的货币政策框架。本研究开发了新的方法，使研究人员能够评估这些变化对财政和货币稳定政策设计的可能影响。新方法将结构性宏观经济建模与强大的经验基础相结合，利用经典的时间序列和最近可用的横截面数据。这项研究的结果有望改善应对宏观经济危机（从高失业率到高通胀）的政策。该奖项资助了三个关于评价宏观经济稳定政策的独立研究项目。第一个项目提供了经验宏观经济学家在实践中应该如何估计政策干预的因果效应的建议。该研究回顾了大量现有方法，然后在丰富的经验相关设置中比较了它们的表现。第二个项目展示了如何结合对意外政策干预效果的实证估计，以预测如果系统性政策框架发生变化将会发生什么。重要的是，这个项目在某种程度上尊重了卢卡斯的批评。研究人员使用这种方法来评估在不同的宏观经济政策设计假设下，美国经济会如何演变。第三个项目研究财政刺激。研究人员认为，如果这样的刺激没有伴随着未来相对快速的增税，那么刺激将通过更高的产出（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”。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.