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...

Ramsey models of fiscal and monetary policy with perfectly-competitive product markets and a fixed supply of capital predict highly volatile inflation with no serial correlation. In this paper, we show that an otherwise-standard Ramsey model that incorporates capital accumulation and habit...

This paper analyzes the specific role of fiscal policy on the welfare effects of macroeconomic stabilization policies. We extend current DSGE models à la Schmitt-Grohè and Uribe (2003) to a non-tandard fiscal policy framework. We focus on distortionary and progressive taxation which alters the...

Emprical studies of hyperinflations reveal that the rational expectations hypothesis fails to hold. To address this issue, we study a model of hyperinflation and learning in an attempt to better understand the volatility in movements of expectations, money, and prices. The findings surprisingly...

Remittance flows are quickly surpassing private capital flows and official aid in magnitude and rate of growth, making them the single most important form of income flows into developing and emerging economies. This paper uses a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model to investigate the...

We analyze the trade-offs faced by a monetary policy authority when a value added tax rate is increased. In the short run, such an increase acts as a cost push shock from the perspective of a central bank that is concerned with stabilizing the welfare relevant output gap. We develop a New...

We study the the emergence of multiple equilibria in models with capital and bonds under various monetary and fiscal policies. We show that the presence of capital is indeed another independent source of local and global multiplicites, even under active policies that yield local determinacy. We...

It has been argued that the Great Inflation of the 1970s has been caused by a Federal Reserve policy that was not aggressive enough in combatting inflation. This led to a scenario where the U.S. economy operated under an indeterminate equilibrium with sunspot shocks becoming a driving force...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the optimality of the monetary authorities reaction function in the two-area medium size model MARCOS (US and euro areas). The parameters and the horizons of output gap and inflation expectations of the Taylor rule are computed in order to minimise a loss...

The monetary instrument problem is examined in an endowment economy model with various stochastic disturbances, with minimizing the variance of inflation as the policy objective. Following current developments in the theory of fiscal determination of the price level, for different monetary...