This paper analyzes the constraints imposed on monetary and fiscal policy design by expectations formation. Households and firms learn about the policy regime using historical data. Regime uncertainty substantially narrows, relative to a rational expectations analysis of the model, the menu of...

What happens if the government's willingness to stabilize a large stock of debt is waning, while the central bank is adamant about preventing a rise in inflation? The large fiscal imbalance brings about inflationary pressures, triggering a monetary tightening, further debt accumulation, and...

The paper examines international issues that arise in the design and evaluation of macroeconomic policy rules. It begins with a theoretical investigation of the effects of fiscal and monetary policy in a two-country rational expectations model with staggered wage and price setting and with...

In traditional societies it is often argued that parents' desire for old age security in the form of transfers from their children provides an important motive for childbearing. Some doubt has been cast on this "old age security hypothesis" by recent estimates which suggest that the rate of...

Formation of the Euro area raises new questions about the coordination of monetary and fiscal policy. Using a New Neoclassical Synthesis (NNS) model, we show that a common monetary policy, responding to area-wide aggregates, has asymmetric effects on countries within the union, depending on...

The paper studies the effects of alternative financing policies in the open economy.There is a non-trivial role for financial policy because of the failure of first-order debt neutrality due to uncertain private lifetimes. Both the single-country case and the interdependent two-country case are...

The paper highlights key considerations necessary for the analysis of international tax competition and the desirability of international tax harmonization. The analysis of a Nash-Cournot international tax competition is carried out for (1) competing countries that cannot exercise significant...

In a competitive two-country overlapping generations model with perfect capital mobility, a plan that is individually Pareto optimal (that is Pareto optimal with respect to individual preferences) can be sustained without coordination of national fiscal policies when the fiscal arsenal is...