This paper represents a first attempt at a tractable analysis of how monetary policy influences the income distribution in an economy. It presents a monetary growth model in which inflation affects credit market efficiency, and via this link, influences capital accumulation, and the income...

Recent attempts to incorporate optimal fiscal policy into NewKeynesian models subject to nominal inertia, have tended to assume that policymakers are benevolent and have access to a commitment technology. A separateliterature, on the New Political Economy, has focused on real economies...

This paper asks whether tax cycles can represent the optimal policy in a model without any extrinsic uncertainty. I show, in an economy without capital and where labor is the only choicevariable (a Lucas-Stokey economy), that a large class of preferences exists, where cycles are optimal, as well...

This paper analyzes German and Spanish fiscal policy using simple policy rules. We choose Germany and Spain, as both are Member States in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and underwent considerable increases in public debt in the early 1990s. We focus on the question, how fiscal policy behaves...

This paper analyzes empirically the impact of fiscal policy on the price level for the cases of Germany and Spain. We investigate whether the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) is able to deliver a reasonable explanation for the different performances of the price level in these two...

This paper analyses the effects of discretionary fiscal policy by presenting new empiricalevidence for Germany within a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework. FollowingBlanchard and Perotti (2002), the SVAR model is identified by applying institutionalinformation. We find no...

We propose and apply a new approach for analyzing the effects of fiscal policyusing vector autoregressions. Unlike most of the previous literature this approachdoes not require that the contemporaneous reaction of some variables to fiscalpolicy shocks be set to zero or need additional...

This paper applies production theory to define a new set of inputs for U.S. households over the post-World War II period and uses newly constructed data on some of these inputs to fit a completehousehold-demand system, including inputs of women’s and men’s housework, and seven other...

The long memory characteristic of financial market volatility is well documentedand has important implications for volatility forecasting and optionpricing. When fitted to the same data, different volatility models calculate theunconditional variance differently and could have very different...

This paper demonstrates the extensive scope of an alternative to standardinstrumental variables methods, namely covariate-based methods, for identifying and es-timating effects of interest in general structural systems. As we show, commonly usedeconometric methods, speci…cally parametric,...