A disturbing feature of the conventional objective function for intertemporal decisions under uncertainty is that the agent's attitudes toward intertemporal substitution and risk aversion are entangled. This paper shows that, in contrast to common perception, the two attitudes can be completely...

In this paper we model a decision maker who must exert costly effort to complete a single task by a fixed deadline. Effort costs evolve stochastically in continuous time. The decision maker will then optimally wait to exert effort until costs are less than a given threshold, the solution to...

We model an innovator's choice of payment scheme and duration as a joint decision in a multi-period licensing game with potential sequential innovations and some irreversibility of technology transfer. We find that it may be optimal to license the innovation for less than the full length of the...

This paper explores a class of Stackelberg differential games in which the open-loop strategies of the leader satisfies time consistency. We show that in this class of games the open-loop equilibrium coincides with the corresponding feedback equilibrium. The analytical framework used in this...

We analyze in this paper the growth and welfare consequences arising from the lack of auditing commitment in a credit market with costly state verification. Specifically, two endogenous growth models, of which one allows lenders to commit to costly auditing strategies to identify borrowers'...

I present a tractable dynamic model of political economy where disagreements about the composition of public spending result in implementation of short-sighted policies. The relative price of investment to consumption is excessively large in equilibrium due to over-taxation. Investment rates are...

When the government must decide not only on broad public-policy programs but also on the provision of group-specific public goods, dynamic strategic inefficiencies arise. The struggle between opposing groups–that disagree on the composition of expenditures and compete for office–results in...

We wish to study optimal dynamic nonlinear income taxes. Do real world taxes share some of their features? What policy prescriptions can be made? We study a two period model, where the consumers and government each have separate budget constraints in the two periods, so income cannot be...

This paper studies optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a small open economy. Two forces in the economy impose orthogonal restrictions on financing costs across governments. The first force requires constant financing costs across governments to have time consistent optimal policy of hours. The...

We study discretionary equilibria in dynamic linear-quadratic rational expectations models. In contrast to the assumptions that pervade this literature we show that these models do have multiple equilibria in some situations. We demonstrate the existence of multiple discretionary equilibria by...