This paper introduces perfect substitutability between private and public consumption in a dynamic, open economy with imperfect competition and nominal rigidities. This implies a direct crowding-out effect that, generalizing to the two-country case some well-known properties of a closed economy,...

The theoretical determinants of maximum sustainable government debt are investigated using Diamond's overlapping-generations model. A level of debt is defined to be 'sustainable' f a steady state with non-degenerate values of economic variables exists. We show that a maximum sustainable level of...

We study the output costs of a reduction in monetary growth in a dynamic general equilibrium model with staggered wages. The money wage is fixed for two periods, and is chosen according to intertemporal optimization. Agents have labour market monopoly power. We show that the introduction of...

A 1990s view is that inflation is best avoided by delegating monetary policy to an independent central bank. However most analyses overlook fiscal policy, which cannot be delegated. Here we make a very simple extension of the usual policy game by introducing the government as a third player, in...