We analyze how public debt evolves when successive policymakers have different policy goals and cannot make credible commitments about their future policies. We consider several cases to be able to disentangle and quantify the respective effects of imperfect commitment and political...

A general-equilibrium model is developed to highlight the link between neo-Keynesian models of unemployment and recent results on the constrained suboptimality of competitive economies with incomplete asset markets. Although the model deviates from the Arrow-Debreu paradigm only by the absence...

Some writers have proposed that under European Monetary Union fiscal policies should be coordinated to reduce the degree of fiscal activism required for macroeconomic stabilization. The paper shows that, in theory, fiscal policy coordination may lower the degree of fiscal flexibility needed to...

Due to time-inconsistency or policymakers' turnover, economic promises are not always fulfilled and plans are revised periodically. This fact is not accounted for in the commitment or the discretion approach. We consider two settings where the planner occasionally defaults on past promises. In...

While popular wisdom holds that the United States should save more now in anticipation of the aging of the baby boom generation, the optimal response to population aging from a macroeconomic perspective is not clear-cut. Indeed, Cutler, Poterba, Sheiner, and Summers ("CPSS",1990) argued that the...

We propose an integrated treatment of the problems of optimal monetary and fiscal policy, for an economy in which prices are sticky (so that the supply-side effects of tax changes are more complex than in standard fiscal analyses) and the only available sources of government revenue are...

The announcement of a plan to cut the U.S. federal budget deficit through the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation provides an excellent opportunity to examine the influence of expectations on economic behavior. This paper presents a small forward-looking macroeconomic model and simulates the...