This paper examines under what conditions fiscal policy in the form of government spending should contribute to macroeconomic stabilisation.  To this end optimal fiscal targeting rules minimising the microfounded social loss are examined in the following settings.  Firstly, for the benchmark...

Mertens and Parthasarathy (1987) proved the existence of sub-game perfect equilibria in discounted stochastic games.  Their method involved new techniques in dynamic programming, which were presented in a very general framework, with no expense spared in highlighting versatility and scope. ...

The paper proves the existence of equilibrium in nonrenewable resource markets when extraction costs are non-convex and resource storage is possible.  Inventories flatten the consumption path and eliminate price jumps at the end of the extraction period.  Market equilibrium becomes then...

Individual behaviors such as smoking, fashion, and the adoption of new products is influenced by taking account of others' actions in one's decisions.  We study social influence in a heterogeneous population and analyze the long-run behavior of the dynamics.  We distinguish between cases in...

We consider optimal monetary and fiscal policies in a New Keynesian model of a small open economy with sticky prices and wages.  In this benchmark setting monetary policy is all we need - analytical results demonstrate that variations in government spending should play no role in the...

For economies in which goods are available in several (discrete) units, this paper identifies two notions of substitutes. The weaker notion guarantees monotonicity of tatonnement processses and convergence of clock auctions to a pseudo-equilibrium, but only the stronger notion, which treats each...

This paper proposes a joint model of tobacco consumption and mortality over the life-cycle. The decision to smoke is a trade off between current utility derived from smoking and a mortality risk increasing with age. Individuals with a longer potential life expectancy have more incentive to cut...

Consider a finite data set where each observation consists of a bunde of contingent consumption chosen by an agent from a constraint set of such bundles.  We develop a general procedure for testing the consistency of this data set with a broad class of models of choice under risk and under...

These are additional notes relating to the paper `The Comparative Statics of Constrained Optimization Problems`, which is appearing in Econometrica. It gathers together material present in various earlier versions of the paper, as well as some new material, which are not found in the published...