This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and their subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between groups that disagree on targeted public spending (e.g., pork) results in governments being endogenously short-sighted:...

This paper characterizes the time-consistency properties of the set of Pareto efficient (or second best) fiscal policies, in a two-class, stochastic economy similar to that in Judd (1985). The key finding is that the continuation of any Pareto efficient policy is always Pareto efficient. Hence,...

In a stochastic economy with overlapping generations, fiscal policy affects the allocation of aggregate risks. The paper shows how to compute the welfare effects of marginal policy changes that shift risk across cohorts, in general and for an application to social security equity investments. I...