Violations of Tinbergen rule and strategic interaction undermine monetary and financial policies in a New Keynesian model with the Bernanke-Gertler accelerator. Welfare costs of risk shocks are large because of efficiency losses and income effects of costly monitoring, but they are larger under...

This paper looks at fiscal solvency and public debt sustainability in both emerging market and advanced countries. Evidence of fiscal solvency, in the form of a robust positive conditional relationship between public debt and the primary fiscal balance, is established in both groups of...

How will countries handle idiosyncratic national macroeconomic shocks under the European single currency? The ways in which European countries now react to internally asymmetric shocks provide a better forecast than do the regional response pattern of the United States. In this paper we compare...

This paper argues that if policymakers seek to enhance global liquidity, then the international community must provide a higher and better coordinated level of fiscal support than it has in the past. Loans to troubled sovereigns or financial institutions imply a credit risk that ultimately must...

This paper studies optimal fiscal policy in an economy where heterogeneous agents with uncertain lifetimes coexist. We show that some plausible social welfare functions lead to time-inconsistent optimal plans, and we suggest restrictions on social preferences that avoid the problem. The...

Ratios of public debt as a share of GDP in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico were 10 percentage points higher on average during 1996-2002 than in the period 1990-1995. Costa Rica's debt ratio remained stable but at a high level near 50 percent. Is there reason to be concerned for the solvency of the...

How high can public debt rise without compromising fiscal solvency? We answer this question using a stochastic ability-to-pay model of sovereign default in which risk-neutral investors lend to a government that displays "fiscal fatigue," because its ability to increase primary balances cannot...