Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

This paper explores the optimal risk sharing arrangement between generations in an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth. We allow for nonseparable preferences, paying particular attention to the risk aversion of the old as well as overall 'life-cycle' risk aversion. We provide a...

If discretionary monetary policy implies an inflation bias, monetary unification boosts the accumulation of public debt. The additional debt accumulation is welfare reducing only if governments are sufficiently myopic. In the presence of myopic governments, debt ceilings play a useful role in...

The combination of discretionary monetary policy, labour-market distortions and nominal wage rigidity yields an inflation bias as monetary policy tries to exploit nominal wage contracts to address labour-market distortions. Although an inflation target eliminates this inflation bias, it creates...

We explore the dynamics of public debt in the presence of political shocks, in the form of shocks to preferences for public spending. Under commitment, optimal stabilization is obtained by combining an inflation target that is contingent on the political shock with a debt target that forces the...

This paper explores the interaction between centralized monetary policy and decentralized fiscal policy in a monetary union. Discretionary monetary policy suffers from a failure to commit. Moreover, decentralized fiscal policymakers impose externalities on each other through the influence of...

The global recession of 2008-09 has revived interest in the international repercussions of domestic policy choices. This paper focuses on the case of fiscal stimulus, investigating cross-border spillovers from an increase in exhaustive government spending on the basis of a two-country business...

The global financial crisis of 2008-09 has sent public debt on sharply higher trajectories. With the economic recovery gradually taking hold, the focus is now shifting to fiscal "exit" strategies. Medium-term consolidation efforts are likely to include not only tax increases but also sizeable...

The impact of fiscal stimulus depends not only on short-term tax and spending policies, but also on expectations about offsetting measures in the future. This paper analyzes the effects of an increase in government spending under a plausible debt-stabilizing policy that systematically reduces...