This paper analyzes the optimal use of fiscal policy and sovereign debt repayment as signals in an asymmetric information environment. It shows that the presence of government private information could turn an optimal full-information countercyclical fiscal policy into a pro-cyclical one that...

How should taxes, government expenditures, the primary and fiscal surpluses and government liabilities be set over the business cycle? We assume that the government chooses expenditures and taxes to maximize the utility of a representative household, utility is increasing in government...

In spite of the concerns about “twin deficits†(fiscal and current account deficits) for the U.S., empirical evidence suggests that “twin divergence†is a more regular feature of the data: when the fiscal accounts worsen, the current account improves and vice versa. We thus...

In this paper we study the quantitative properties of alternative social security regimes in a large overlapping generations model where households face uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. We study this issue in two model economies. The first is the standard one characterized by exogenous...

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...

We propose a theory where capital market imperfections are at the origin of cross-country TFP differences. In our theory entrepreneurs have private information about the multifactor productivity of their technology. We study how the contracting environment, as described by the ability to enforce...

I analyze how lack of commitment affects the maturity structure of sovereign debt. Ex post, the government trades off the gains from default induced redistribution against the cost of defaulting. Ex ante, the government issues debt of various maturities to raise an exogenous revenue requirement....

Heterogeneity between unemployed and employed individuals matters for optimal fiscal policy. This paper considers the consequences of welfare heterogeneity between these two groups for the determination of optimal capital and labor income taxes in a model with matching frictions in the labor...

This paper studies the effects of a flat-tax reform in a dynamic, general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and occupational choice. Each agent has a choice to be a worker or to establish a firm and become an entrepreneur with a limited ability to borrow in financial markets. Because...

We study the structure of optimal wedges and wealth taxes in a Mirrleesian economy with endogenous skills. Human capital is a private state variable that drives the skill process of each individual. Building on the findings of the labor literature, we assume that human capital investment is a)...