Many countries run substantial inflations. They do this despite the overwhelming theoretical arguments (and empirical evidence?) showing that price stability (or even mild deflation) is "better." This paper provides a simple model in which a government sometimes uses the inflation tax because it...

The paper presents a model of fiscal and monetary policy that evaluates the tradeoff between higher distortionary labor taxation and higher inflation in the resolution of fiscal crises. In the model government debt is domestically held and nominal. Data are presented to show that such debt is...

We study optimal capital taxation under limited commitment. We prove that the optimal tax rate on capital income should be positive in steady state and should be increasing over time provided that full risk-sharing is not feasible. In a limited commitment environment, a one unit increase of...

We study macroeconomic stabilization when monetary and fiscal policies interact via their effects on output and inflation and the monetary authority is more conservative than the fiscal. We find that monetary-fiscal interactions result in poor macroeconomic stabilization. With both policies...

Robust control allows policymakers to formulate policies that guard against model misspecification. The principal tools used to solve robust control problems are state-space methods (see Hansen and Sargent, 2005, and Giordani and Soderlind, 2004). In this paper we show that the structural-form...

How can a particular allocation and prices be implemented? Under what conditions does a policy deliver a unique competitive equilibrium? How many degrees of freedom there are in the determination of the policy variables, or how many are the instruments of policy? In this paper we analyze a...

This paper develops a model where the value of the monetary policy instrument is selected by a heterogenous committee engaged in a dynamic voting game. Committee members differ in their institutional power and, in certain states of nature, they also differ in their preferred instrument value....

We focus on a quantitative assessment of rigid labor markets in an environment of stable monetary policy. We ask how wages and labor market shocks feed into the inflation process and derive monetary policy implications. We structurally model matching frictions and rigid wages in line with an...