I show how to implement in a simple manner the comparison of alternative monetary policy rules in a two-country model of the new generation. These rules are: Full Price Stability, Taylor, Fixed and Managed Exchange Rates. I find, first, that the exchange rate dynamic is non-stationary unless...

Industrial countries moving from fixed to floating exchange rate regimes experience dramatic rises in the variability of the real exchange rate. This evidence, forcefully documented by Mussa (1986), is a puzzle to the extent that it is hard to reconcile with the assumption of flexible prices....

We lay out a tractable small open economy version of the canonical sticky price model, and use it as a framework to study the properties of three alternative monetary regimes: (a) optimal monetary policy, (b) a Taylor rule, and (c) an exchange rate peg. Several interesting results emerge from...

I study the macroeconomic costs (both in terms of stabilization and welfare) of the relinquishment of monetary policy independence associated with the membership of a currency area. The analysis is framed within a general equilibrium model of the world economy, composed by a large closed Union...

The effects of public debt and redistribution are intimately related. We illustrate this in a model with heterogenous agents and imperfect credit markets. Our setup di¤ers from the classic Savers-Spenders model of ?scal policy in that all agents engage in intertemporal optimization, but a...

In an economy with financial imperfections, Ricardian equivalence holds when prices are flexible and the steady-state distribution of consumption is uniform, or labor is inelastic. With different steady-state consumption levels, Ricardian equivalence fails, but tax cuts, somewhat paradoxically,...

During a fiscal stimulus, does it matter, for the size of the government spending multiplier, which category of agents bears the brunt of the current and/or future adjustment in taxes? In an economy with heterogeneous agents and imperfect financial markets, the answer depends on whether or not...

With perfect credit markets, any (lump-sum) tax redistribution is neutral. We study the e¤ects of a tax redistribution in an economy with heterogenous agents and borrowing constraints. Under ?exible prices, a tax redistribution that favors "the poor" (i.e., the credit constrained) is neutral,...