This paper examines the global macro-dynamics of an OLG model with capital and land with rational expectations. Through the interactions between capital accumulation and land prices, the economy experiences phase transitions, endogenously moving back and forth from situations with unique and...

In this paper I attempt to clarify the nature of the losses associated with inflation within a conventional model of a competitive economy. I shall argue that were inflation fully anticipated, it would be "almost neutral" provided (a) that the tax system were fully indexed and (b) that interest...

This paper considers the appropriate stabilization objectives for monetary policy in a microfounded model with staggered price-setting. Rotemberg and Woodford (1997) and Woodford (2002) have shown that under certain conditions, a local approximation to the expected utility of the representative...

This paper derives loss functions for monetary policy that are grounded in the welfare of private agents, for optimizing models with nominal price rigidities. Inflation stabilization enhances welfare, insofar as variable inflation results in real distortions when prices are not adjusted...

The central result of this paper is that when moral hazard ispresent,competitive equilibrium is almost always (constrained) inefficient. Moral hazard causes shadow prices to deviate from market prices. To remedy this market failure, the government could introduce differential commodity taxation....

In previous work (Eggertsson and Woodford, 2003), we characterized the optimal conduct of monetary policy when a real disturbance causes the natural rate of interest to be temporarily negative, so that the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates binds, and showed that commitment to a...

We propose an integrated treatment of the problems of optimal monetary and fiscal policy, for an economy in which prices are sticky and the only available sources of government revenue are distorting taxes. Our linear-quadratic approach allows us to nest both conventional analyses of optimal...

The optimal income tax problem, since it requires self-selection constraints which define nonconvex feasible sets, is one of the many problems in economics for which randomization in the solution may be desirable. For a two-class economy. we characterize the optimal random tax schedules and we...