This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

We derive a model in which a standard international capital asset pricing (ICAPM) model is nested within an ICAPM model with market imperfections. In the latter model an idiosyncratic stochastic factor affects the return of risky assets (over a risk-free rate) on top of the systematic component...

See also <I>Proceedings of Banca d' Italia Public Finance Workshop on "Rules and Institutions for Sound Fiscal Policy after the Crisis"</I> (pp. 443-475). Rome: Banca d'Italia.<P> and<P> 'From Budgetary Forecasts to Ex Post Fiscal Data: Exploring the Evolution of Fiscal Forecast Errors in the European Union'...</p></p></i>

This paper derives and estimates rules for fiscal policy that prescribe the optimal response to changes in unemployment and debt. We combine the reduced form model of the economy from a linear VAR with a non-linear welfare function and obtain analytic solutions for optimal policy. The variables...

Poland edged towards hyperinflation towards the latter half of 1989,but inflation fell dramatically after drastic reformswere enacted in January of 1990. We analyse the consistency betweenfiscal deficits and inflation targets and assessPoland's domestic and foreign debt management policies and...

Inspired by a recent observation about an online retail company, this paper explains why a firm may find it optimal to offer an exit bonus to recent hires so as to induce self-selection. We study a double adverse selection problem, in which the principal can neither observe agents’ commitment...

Some committees are made up of experts, persons interested in both the (subject) matter at hand and in coming across as able decision-makers. Such committees would like to conceal disagreement from the public. We present a theory that describes the reaction of experts to the requirement to...

Most of the available monthly interest data series consist of monthlyaverages of daily observations. It is well-known that this averaging introduces spurious autocorrelation effectsin the first differences of the series. It isexactly this differenced series we are interested in when...

Champions of sustainable growth often call for more durable production technologies with less capital depreciation. As investment in more durable capital is encouraged by lower interest rates, we investigate whether policy makers can steer the economy towards a path with low interest rates in...