In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

In recent years the world economy has been subject to large and unsyncronized changes in fiscal policies, high and volatile real rates of tnterest, large fluctuations in real exchange rates, and significant variations in private-sector spending. This paper reviews some of the key facts...

This paper studies optimal fiscal policy in an economy where heterogeneous agents with uncertain lifetimes coexist. We show that some plausible social welfare functions lead to time-inconsistent optimal plans, and we suggest restrictions on social preferences that avoid the problem. The...

Prevalent thinking about liquidity traps suggests that the perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate renders open-market operations ineffective for achieving macroeconomic stabilization goals. In an earlier paper, we showed that this reasoning does...

The aging of the population shakes the confidence in the economic viability of pay-as-you-go social security systems. We demonstrate how in a political-economy framework the shaken cofidence leads to the downsizing of the social security-system, and to the emergence of supplemental individual...

Using a human capital based growth model, we show the essential role of labor mobility and cross-country tax harmonization in equalizing income levels of countries that start off from different initial income positions. Knowledge spillovers cum labor mobility are the driving forces behind the...

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...

This paper studies the transmission of fiscal disturbances between countries, and the effect of those disturbances on worldwide capital intensity, in a context of growth. The model developed to address these issues allows for the production of both nontradable and relatively capital-intensive...

We develop a stylized EU-type model of a union consisting of rich, capital-abundant and high productivity countries, and poor, capital-scarce and low productivity countries. We address two main issues: the efficiency of tax competition and the effect of factor mobility on the size of the welfare...