This paper studies the interactions of fiscal and monetary policy when they stabilise a single economy against shocks in a dynamic setting. We assume that fiscal and monetary policies both stabilise the economy only by causing changes to aggregate demand. Our findings are as follows. If the both...

Leith and Wren-Lewis (2007) have shown that government debt is returned to its pre-shock level in a New Keynesian model under optimal discretionary policy. This has two important implications for monetary and fiscal policy. First, in a high-debt economy, it may be optimal for discretionary...

Central banks’ economic and political importance has grown in advanced economies since the start of the Great Financial Crisis in 2007. An unwillingness or inability of governments to use countercyclical fiscal policy has made monetary policy the only stabilization tool in town. However, much...

Monetary and Fiscal policies interact in many ways. Recently the stance of fiscal policy in a number of countries has raised concerns about the risks for the outcomes of monetary policy. This paper first shows that these concerns are justified since, under ambitious fiscal policy makers,...

We analyse the proposed ‘stability pact’ for countries joining a European Monetary Union (EMU). Within EMU shortsighted governments fail to fully internalize the inflationary consequences of their debt policies, which results in excessive debt accumulation. Hence, although in the absence of...

We generalise the analysis of inflation bias with dynamic Phillips curves in three respects. First, we examine the discretionary (time consistent) solution in cases where the Phillips curve has both a backward looking and forward-looking component. Second, we show that the commitment (time...

The goal of this Paper is to compute optimal monetary and fiscal policy rules in a real business cycle model augmented with sticky prices, a demand for money, taxation, and stochastic government consumption. We consider simple policy rules whereby the nominal interest rate is set as a function...

We analyse the stability of countries within a monetary union in the face of asymmetric shocks, using a simple but widely applicable model. We show that members of the union may be subject to severe, and possibly unstable, cycles following asymmetric shocks if there is a significant backward...

It is widely argued that Europe's unified monetary policy calls for international coordination at the fiscal level. We survey the issues involved with such coordination of fiscal policy as a demand management tool and we use a simple model to investigate the circumstances under which...

This paper investigates the importance of fiscal policy in providing macroeconomic stabilisation in a monetary union. We use a microfounded New Keynesian model of a monetary union which incorporates persistence in inflation and non-Ricardian consumers, and derive optimal simple rules for fiscal...