The paper analyses the way in which monetary and fiscal policy influences the performances of economic growth and social welfare. The analysis is made on the basis of a dynamic model with discrete variables. The model is with a representative private agent and a government sector consisting of a...

The paper analyses the way in which monetary and fiscal policy influences the performances of economic growth. The analysis is made on the basis of a dynamic model with discrete variables of the Sidrauski- Brock type, with infinite-lived households and money in the utility function. The model is...

Our aim is to provide insights into some basic facts of US government debt management by introducing simple financial frictions in a Ramsey model of fiscal policy. We find that the share of short bonds in total U.S. debt is large, persistent, and highly correlated with total debt. A well known...

Our aim is to provide insights into some basic facts of US government debt management by introducing simple financial frictions in a Ramsey model of fiscal policy. We find that the share of short bonds in total U.S. debt is large, persistent, and highly correlated with total debt. A well known...

When is it optimal for a government to default on its legal repayment obligations? We answer this question for a small open economy with domestic production risk in which the government optimally fi…nances itself by issuing non-contingent debt. We show that Ramsey optimal policies occasionally...

I develop a novel link between frictions in international financial markets and fiscal procyclicality.Complementing existing evidence, A decomposition of government expenditure into social spending and public good spending reveals that the cyclical correlation of social spending exhibits the...

Emerging market economies typically exhibit a procyclical fiscal policy: public expenditures rise (fall) in economic expansions (recessions), whereas tax rates rise (fall) in bad (good) times. Additionally, the business cycle of these economies is characterized by countercyclical default risk....

The authors revisit the debt overhang question. They first use nonparametric techniques to isolate a panel of countries on the downward sloping section of a debt Laffer Curve. In particular, overhang countries are ones where a threshold level of debt is reached in sample, beyond which (initial)...

I analyze how lack of commitment affects the maturity structure of sovereign debt. Ex post, the government trades off the gains from default induced redistribution against the cost of defaulting. Ex ante, the government issues debt of various maturities to raise an exogenous revenue requirement....