This paper examines the issue of fiscal sustainability in emerging market countries and industrial countries. We highlight the importance of the time series properties of the primary surplus and debt, and find evidence of a positive long run relationship. Consequently we emphasise, that...

Cross-country evidence on sub-central governments’ responses to cuts in grants received from central government shows the typical response is to adjust expenditure rather than offset cuts by raising ‘own’ revenues. Spending cuts are focused on the wage bill and, disproportionately, on...

We incorporate an uncoordinated redistributive struggle for extra fiscal privileges into an otherwise standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. The main aim is to get model-consistent quantitative evidence of the extent of rent seeking. Our work is motivated by the common belief...

This paper studies the quantitative implications of changes in the composition of taxes for long-run growth and expected lifetime utility in the UK economy over 1970-2005. Our setup is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model incorporating a detailed fiscal policy structure, and whose...

Time-inconsistency is an essential feature of many policy problems (Kydland and Prescott, 1977). This paper presents and compares three methods for computing Markov-perfect opti- mal policies in stochastic nonlinear business cycle models. The methods considered include value function iteration,...

Motivated by the highly-unionized public sectors, the high public shares in total em- ployment, and the public sector wage premia observed in Europe, this paper examines the importance of public sector unions for macroeconomic theory. The model gen- erates cyclical behavior in hours and wages...

Recent work on optimal monetary and fiscal policy in New Keynesian models suggests that it is optimal to allow steady-state debt to follow a random walk. Leith and Wren-Lewis (2012) consider the nature of the timeinconsistency involved in such a policy and its implication for discretionary...

We construct a general equilibrium model of economic growth and optimally chosen fiscal policy, in which individuals compete with each other for a share of government spending and two political parties can alternate in power according to an exogenous reelection probability. The main prediction...

Recent attempts to incorporate optimal fiscal policy into New Keynesian models subject to nominal inertia, have tended to assume that policy makers are benevolent and have access to a commitment technology. A separate literature, on the New Political Economy, has focused on real economies where...