Die vorliegende Studie wurde von Sandra Hamella, geb. Waller, während ihrer Tätigkeit als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im ifo Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, München, begonnen und im Sommer 2005 an der Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Regensburg als Dissertation...

Individuals choosing among payoffs available at different points in time are considered as rational if they are time consistent. This occurs when their plans of actions are effectively implemented. With time consistent decision makers, the paper points out an interesting dual behavior related...

If private sector agents hold rational expectations, they will predict any future policy switches. Discounting the announced optimal policies, if they are not credible, will lead to a response which deprives the government of any incentive to renege on previous announcements and of the benefits...

We define and study transparency, credibility and reputation in a model where the central bank’s characteristics are unobservable to the private sector and are inferred from the policy outcome. A low-credibility bank optimally conducts a more inflationary policy than a high-credibility bank,...

This paper demonstrates how time consistency of the Ramsey policy (the optimal fiscal and monetary policy under commitment) can be achieved. Each government should leave its successor with a unique maturity structure for the nominal and indexed debt, such that the marginal benefit of a surprise...

We test for evidence that US trade policy depends on the degree of government discretion. We do this by studying US tariff choices under two distinct environments. One is that of tariffs set under the Escape Clause (section 201 of the US Trade Act of 1974). The other is the Tokyo Round of GATT...

This paper develops a dynamic model of seigniorage in which economies' equilibrium paths reflect the ongoing strategic interaction between an optimizing government and a rational public. The model extends existing positive models of monetary policy and inflation by explicitly incorporating the...

From the classical gold standard up to the current ERM2 arrangement of the European Union, target zones have been a widely used exchange regime in contemporary history. This paper presents a benchmark model that rationalizes the choice of target zones over the rest of regimes: the fixed rate,...