We study the effects of changes in uncertainty about future fiscal policy on aggregate economic activity. Fiscal deficits and public debt have risen sharply in the wake of the financial crisis. While these developments make fiscal consolidation inevitable, there is considerable uncertainty about...

This paper formulates an optimizing model of a small open economywith a representative (immortal) household, a firm and agovernment. The asset menu consists of domestic currency,non-traded bonds and traded bonds. There is a risk-premium ontraded bonds, which leads to deviations from perfect...

The global financial crisis of 2008-09 has sent public debt on sharply higher trajectories. With the economic recovery gradually taking hold, the focus is now shifting to fiscal "exit" strategies. Medium-term consolidation efforts are likely to include not only tax increases but also sizeable...

Assuming the role of debt management is to provide hedging against fiscal shocks we consider three questions: i) what indicators can be used to assess the performance of debt management? ii) how well have historical debt management policies performed? and iii) how is that performance affected by...

The aim of this Paper is to test for the extent of incompleteness in the market for US Government debt. We show that when a government pursues an optimal tax policy and issues a full set of contingent claims, the value of debt has the same or less persistence than other variables in the economy...

This paper considers the effects of monetary and fiscal policies in an optimizing model with capital accumulation and finite lives. An increase in monetary growth is no longer superneutral in a money-capital economy, but leads to a reduction in the real interest rate and increases in the capital...

According to conventional wisdom, fiscal policy is more effective under a fixed than under a flexible exchange rate regime. In this paper we reconsider the transmission of shocks to government spending across these regimes within a standard new-Keynesian model of a small open economy. Because of...

Our aim is to provide insights into some basic facts of US government debt management by introducing simple financial frictions in a Ramsey model of fiscal policy. We find that the share of short bonds in total U.S. debt is large, persistent, and highly correlated with total debt. A well known...

The development of the seven main OECD economies during the 1970s and 1980s is discussed. Subsequently, wage equations of the error-correction type for the seven largest OECD economies are estimated. The hypothesis of real wage rigidity cannot be rejected for the French, German, Italian and...

We show how to model portfolio models in the presence of long bonds. Specifically we study optimal fiscal policy under incomplete markets where the government issues bonds of maturity N 1. Assuming the existence of long bonds introduces an additional intertemporal mechanism that makes taxes...