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...

Critics of modern macroeconomics often raise concerns about unwarranted welfare conclusions and data mining. This paper illustrates these concerns with a thought experiment, based on the debate in environmental economics about the appropriate discount rate in climate change analyses: I set up an...

In this paper we present a method for using rational expectations in a linear-quadratic optimizationframework. Following the approach put forward by Sims, we solve the model through a QZdecomposition, which is generally easier to implement than the more widely used method of Blanchardand Kahn.