This paper considers an optimal taxation environment where household income is private information, and the government randomly audits and punishes households found to be underreporting. We prove that the optimal mechanism derived using standard mechanism design techniques has a bad equilibrium...

In this paper we show that interest rate rules lead to multiple equilibria when the central bank faces a limit to its ability to print money, or when private agents are limited in the amount of bonds that can be pledged to the central bank in exchange for money. Some of the equilibria are...

Across different layers of the U.S. government there are surprisingly large differences in institutional provisions that impose fiscal discipline, such as constitutionally mandated deficit or debt limits, or specific tax bases. In this paper we develop a framework that can be used to...

We study the effects of credit shocks in a model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financing constraints, and a realistic firm size distribution. As entrepreneurial firms can grow only slowly and rely heavily on retained earnings to expand the size of their business in this set-up, we show that,...

We review the role of the central bank's (CB) balance sheet in a textbook monetary model, and explore what changes if the central bank is allowed to pay interest on its liabilities. When the central bank cannot pay interest, away from the zero lower bound its (real) balance sheet is limited by...

In this paper, we assess the empirical relationship between population growth, mobility, and state-level capital spending in the United States. To evaluate the magnitude of the coefficients, we introduce an explicit, quantitative political-economy model of government spending determination,...

We analyze the democratic politics and competitive economics of a ‘golden rule’ that separates capital and ordinary account budgets and allows a government to issue debt to finance only capital items. Many national governments followed this rule in the 18th and 19th centuries and most U.S....

We study a simple model of production, accumulation, and redistribution, where agents are heterogeneous in their initial wealth, and a sequence of redistributive tax rates is voted upon. Though the policy is infinite-dimensional, we prove that a median voter theorem holds if households have...