LAUSR

We study optimal debt management in the face of shocks that can precipitate the economy into a liquidity trap and call for an increase in public spending in order to mitigate the resulting recession. Our approach follows the sizable literature of macroeconomic models of debt management, which we extend to the case where the zero lower bound on the short-term interest rate binds. We wish to identify the conditions under which removing long debt from the secondary market can become an optimal policy outcome. We show that the optimal debt-management strategy is to issue short-term debt if the government faces a sizable exogenous increase in public spending and if its initial liability is not very large. In this case, our results run against the standard prescription of the debt-management literature. Finally, we show that when the government sets optimally the level of public spending, the optimality of long-term debt is restored.