This paper examines theoretically, using a two-country real-business-cycle model, the effects of capital-market liberalization when there is limited participation in national financial markets. It is assumed that workers cannot smooth consumption as well as do stockholders, and therefore,...

This paper shows how to use optimal control theory to derive time-consistent optimal government policies in nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium models. It extends the insight of Cohen and Michel (1988), who showed that in _linear_ models time-consistent policies can be found by imposing a...

We determine the optimal degree of price inflation volatility when nominal wages are sticky and the government uses state-contingent inflation to finance government spending. We address this question in a well-understood Ramsey model of fiscal and monetary policy, in which the benevolent planner...

In this paper we analyse the monetary impact of alternative fiscal policy rules using the debt and deficit, both mentioned as measures of fiscal policy performance in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). We use a New Keynesian model, with distortionary taxation and an appropriately defined...

In this paper, we examine the cost of insurance against model uncertainty for the Euro area considering four alternative reference models, all of which are used for policy-analysis at the ECB. We find that maximal insurance across this model range in terms of a Minimax policy comes at moderate...

In this note a one-state, one-control variable quadratic linear problem with robust control and discount factor is developed to examine the optimal response of the first-period control to changes in future model uncertainty. A change in future model uncertainty has an effect on the optimal...

We seek to shed new light on the social process of political opinion formation from an evolutionary perspective.We propose a model in which heterogeneous citizens collectively learn and modify their opinions about the most convenient size of public expenditure for the economy. In Section 1, we...

Various approaches to optimal monetary policy have been used to select time-invariant policy rules, including the timeless perspective approach by Woodford (1999) and the unconditional expected utility criterion of McCallum (2000). In this paper, we argue instead that policy rules should be...

In this paper we study optimal taxation in a dynamic game played by a sequence of governments, one for each time period, and a private sector composed of a continuum of households. We focus on the Markov-Perfect equilibrium of this game under two assumptions on the extent of government's...

Fluctuations of representative agent economies are not very costly. So if business cycles matter, it must be because agents face uninsured idiosyncratic risk which is somehow worsened by aggregate fluctuation. Idiosyncratic risk could be counteracted either through aggregate stabilization or...