This paper makes the case for a third stimulus package to in the face of economic indicators signaling that the economy is in a deeper downturn than was expected based on previous projections. Specifically, the report calls for an employer tax-credit for extending health care coverage and...

Price-level determination requires co-ordination of monetary and fiscal policy to ensure a unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE). This paper derives a number of implications for simple interest rate rules resulting from various fiscal strategies. We show that fiscal choices under either...

Jim Tobin, who died on March 11, 2002 at the age of 84, was one of giants of economics of the second half of the twentieth century and the greatest macroeconomist of his generation. Tobin’s influence on macroeconomic theory is so pervasive - so much part of our professional ‘acquis’ - that...

This paper proposes conditions for the existence and uniqueness of solutions to systems of differential equations with delays or advances in which some variables are non-predetermined. An application to the issue of optimal interest rate policy is then develop in a flexible-price model where...

After the centrally-planned economy ceased to exist, the process of post-socialist transformations has advanced significantly. The countries of the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Southern and Eastern Europe (SEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have been involved since in...

In this paper we review some fundamental issues that have been identified by macroeconomists in discussing the co-ordination of monetary and fiscal policy. As Sargent and Wallace (1981) graphically illustrated, the consolidated public sector present-value budget constraint means that monetary...

We present data on debt accumulation in Australia and the United States, and tentative data on Romania, to pose the question of whether Romania might experience a credit crunch as a result of the US subprime financial crisis. We develop a model of a credit crunch in a pure credit economy with...

We develop a simple model for studying the impact of monetary and fiscal policies on aggregate demand, at the business cycle frequencies. We focus on two questions principally. First, what are the key properties of the joint optimal simple rules governing the conduct of the systematic components...

Economic theory has yet to come up with a general guidance regarding the dynamic effects and welfare implications of shocks to public spending. With the aim to provide a theoretical benchmark, we analyze if a rise in private consumption following an exogenous rise in government spending is a...

Since the work of Doepke and Schneider (2006a) and Meh and Terajima (2008), we know that inflation causes major redistribution of wealth - between households and the government, between nationals and foreigners, and between households within the same country. Two types of monetary policy,...