We wish to understand the implications of recent shifts in US productivity for the structure of optimal monetary policy rules. Accordingly, we augment a standard inflation targeting model in which a forward-looking version of the Taylor rule constitutes the optimal monetary policy with regime...

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 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...

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 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...