Several recent papers have proposed recursive Lagrangian-based methods for solving dynamic contracting problems. These methods give rise to Bellman operators that incorporate either a dual inf-sup or a saddle point operation. We give conditions that ensure the Bellman operator implied by a dual...

We characterize the long run outcome of a dynamic private information economy with public capital accumulation. The economy is typical of those assumed in the new dynamic public finance literature. We establish that almost all agents converge to misery or luxury and bound the fraction who are...

We analyze optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy with distortionary labor income taxes, nominal rigidities and nominal debt of various maturities. Optimal policy prescribes the exclusive use of long term debt. Such debt mitigates the distortions associated with hedging fiscal shocks...

Recursive game theory provides theoretical procedures for computing the equilibrium payoff sets of repeated games and the equilibrium payoff correspondences of dynamic games. In this paper, we propose and implement outer and inner approximation methods for value correspondences that naturally...

This paper considers optimal social insurance in a dynamic moral hazard economy. The existing literature has focussed on environments in which a planner and a population of agents share the same discount factor. A key finding is that agents are then almost surely immiserated; their welfare is...

We consider a dynamic moral hazard economy inhabited by a planner and a population of privately informed agents. We assume that the planner and the agents share the same discount factor, but that the planner cannot commit. We show that optimal allocations in such settings solve the problems of...