We provide a rationale for the observed pro-cyclicality of tax policies in emerging markets and present a novel mechanism through which tax policy amplifies the business cycle. Our explanation relies on two features of emerging markets: limited access to financial markets and limited commitment...

We provide sufficient conditions for the feasibility of a Pareto-improving fiscal policy when the risk-free interest rate on government bonds is below the growth rate (r g). We do so in the class of incomplete markets models pioneered by Bewley-Huggett-Aiyagari, but we allow for an arbitrary...

We characterize fiscal and monetary policy in a monetary union with the potential for rollover crises in sovereign debt markets. Member-country fiscal authorities lack commitment to repay their debt and choose fiscal policy independently. A common monetary authority chooses inflation for the...

We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the...

This paper explores the positive and normative consequences of government bond issuances in a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous agents, focusing on how the stock of government bonds affects the cross-sectional allocation of resources in the spirit of Samuelson (1958). We characterize the...