The microeconomic foundations provided by the 'disequilibrium' macro-modelling approach of Barro-Grossman-Malinvaud are used to compare the performance of government spending and taxation as instruments of fiscal demand management in achieving a welfare optimum. Spending is successively treated...

A dynamic, stochastic optimizing macromodel with predetermined money wages and labour market monopoly power is used to examine the effect on current macroeconomic variables of a temporary increase in variability of the future money supply. As a benchmark, we show that under perfect wage-price...

The theoretical determinants of maximum sustainable government debt are investigated using Diamond's overlapping-generations model. A level of debt is defined to be 'sustainable' if a steady state with non-degenerate values of economic variables exists. We show that a maximum sustainable level...

A dynamic stochastic model of a small open monetary economy with infinitely-lived optimizing households is constructed. There are temporary nominal rigidities in the labour market, while in goods and asset markets prices are flexible. Optimizing behaviour in the foreign country is also modelled....

Monetary, fiscal and exchange intervention policy are examined in a symmetric, two-country, two-period model. Money wages are rigid in period one, causing unemployment. In each period there is a single world output, traded in a perfectly competitive world market. The exchange rate is flexible,...

A sizeable literature examines exchange rate pass-through to disaggregated import prices but very few micro-studies focus on consumer prices. This paper explores exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices in South Africa during 2002-2007, using a unique data set of highly disaggregated data...

A stochastic two-period model of a small open economy with optimizing consumption and portfolio choice is constructed. Exchange rate risk means domestic-currency bonds are imperfect substitutes for foreign-currency bonds. Expectations are rational, i.e. subjective probability distributions equal...

As a companion to a previous paper, monetary and fiscal policy are analyzed in (a) a small open economy and (b) a two-country world, where in addition to a fixed wage causing unemployment, countries now produce specialized products whose prices are fixed, causing excess supply. There are two...

We study the output costs of a reduction in monetary growth in a dynamic general equilibrium model with staggered wages. As in John Taylor’s approach, the money wage is fixed for two periods, but in our model it is also chosen according to intertemporal optimization, as are consumption and...

A monetary overlapping generations model with oligopolistic imperfect competition is constructed. In general, output and employment are below their full employment levels. Three alternative expectations hypotheses are used - 'adaptive', 'monetarist' and 'pure rational' - all of which ensure no...