We analyze the interaction between committed monetary policy and discretionary fiscal policy in a model with public debt, endogenous government expenditures, distortive taxation and nominal rigidities. Fiscal decisions lack commitment but are Markovperfect. Monetary commitment to an interest...

The behavior of French economy in the 1920s rapresents a very interesting episode, wich attracted considerable analytical interest among the contemporaneous and, more recently, among aconomists and historians.

This paper models the housing sector, mortgages and endogenous default in a DSGE setting with nominal and real rigidities. We use data for the period 1981-2006 to estimate our model using Bayesian techniques. We analyze how an increase in risk in the mortgage market raises the default rate and...

Survey data suggests that news of changes in business conditions are significantly related to house prices and consumers' beliefs of favorable buying conditions in the housing market. This paper explores the transmission of "news shocks" as a source of boom-bust cycles in the housing market....

I consider transactions involving asymmetric prisoners' dilemmas between pairs of players selected chosen from two large populations. Games are played repeatedly, but information about cheating is not adequate to sustain cooperation, and there is no official legal system of contract enforcement....

We consider the political economy of a monetary union wheremember governments attempt to influence the policy of the commoncentral bank. Modeling this as a common agency with incentivecontracts, we show that if incentives are all that matters for the bank,the equilibrium implements a weighted...