Fiscal rules—legal restrictions on government borrowing, spending, or debt accumulation (like the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act in the United States)—have recently been adopted or considered in several countries, both industrial and developing. Previous literature stresses that such laws...

Why do governments issue large amounts of debt? In what sense and for whom is such a policy optimal? We show that twisting the optimal taxation paradigm produces very reasonable predictions for debt and real interest rates. Adding an extra dimension of uncertainty about the political planning...

This paper highlights the importance of debt composition in setting optimal fiscal and monetary policy over short-run business cycles and in the long run. Nominal debt as state-contingent debt can be a significant policy tool to reduce the volatility of distortionary government policy, thereby...

This paper provides a critical survey of the literature on politico-institutional determinants of the government budget. We organize our discussion around two questions: Why did certain OECD countries, but not others, accumulate large public debts? Why did these fiscal imbalances appear in the...

The paper develops a model of inflationary finance that defines the fiscal deficit as a function of the virtual deficit—a deficit that would be observed if inflation were zero. It studies the negative relationship between the inflation rate and real government expenditures—the Patinkin...

The role of remittances in development and economic growth is not well understood. This is partly because the literatures on the causes and effects of remittances remain separate. We develop a framework that links the motivation for remittances with their effect on economic activity. Because...

A view receiving increased support is that the height of trade costs in prime export sectors has a strong effect on current account balances: countries specializing in sectors that face relatively high trade costs, such as services, tend to run current account deficits, and similarly, countries...

This paper constructs a general equilibrium model with monopolistically competitive firms and endogenous markups where government spending consists of both consumption and investment goods. It is shown that when markups are countercyclical, increases in the share of investment goods in aggregate...

Corruption, particularly political or “grand” corruption, distorts the entire decision-making process connected with public investment projects. The degree of distortions is higher with weaker auditing institutions. The evidence presented shows that higher corruption is associated with (i)...