Evaluating Macroeconomic Stabilization Policy

最近几年，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，联邦已转向新的货币政策框架。这项研究开发了新的方法，使研究人员能够评估这种变化在财政和货币稳定政策设计中可能产生的影响。新方法将联合收割机结构宏观经济模型与强大的经验基础相结合，利用经典的时间序列以及最近可用的横截面数据。该研究的成果有望改善对高失业率和高通胀等宏观经济危机的政策应对。该奖项资助了三个独立的研究项目，评估宏观经济稳定政策。第一个项目就经验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建议。该研究回顾了大量现有的方法，然后在丰富的，经验相关的设置中比较它们的性能。第二个项目展示了如何将联合收割机对意外政策干预效果的经验估计结合起来，以预测如果系统性政策框架发生变化会发生什么。重要的是，该项目以尊重卢卡斯批评的方式这样做。研究人员使用这种方法来评估美国经济在宏观经济政策设计的替代假设下将如何演变。第三个项目研究财政刺激。研究人员认为，如果这种刺激措施没有伴随着未来相对快速的增税，那么刺激措施将通过增加产出来“自我融资”。（增加基本盈余）和更高的通货膨胀（侵蚀政府债务的真实的价值），该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过评估被认为值得支持使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

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.