We characterise optimal fiscal policies when the government has access to consumption taxation but cannot credibly commit to future policies, in a calibrated Real Business Cycle model of the United States economy. Contrary to the case where only labour and capital income are taxed, the optimal...

We extend the model of risk sharing with limited commitment (Kocherlakota, 1996) by introducing both a public and a private (non-contractible and/or non-observable) storage technology. Positive public storage relaxes future participation constraints and may hence improve risk sharing, contrary...

In the typical model of risk sharing with limited commitment (e.g. Kocherlakota, 1996) agents do not have access to any technology transferring resources intertemporally. In our model, agents have a private (non-contractible and/or non-observable) saving technology. We first show that, under...

This paper studies the role of preference and income risk heterogeneity when risk sharing is partial due to limited commitment. I estimate the dynamic contract determining self-enforcing insurance transfers in a structural manner, and allow the coefficient of relative risk aversion and...

This paper contributes to a recent debate about the structural and institutional conditions under which discretion may be superior to timeless perspective. We show this is unlikely when the policy maker relies on a welfare-theoretic loss function obtained as a second-order approximation of...

Allowing habits to be formed at the level of individual goods – deep habits - can radically alter the fiscal policy transmission mechanism as the counter-cyclicality of mark-ups this implies can result in government spending crowding-in rather than crowding-out private consumption in the short...

We characterise optimal fiscal policies in a Real Business Cycle model when the government has access to consumption taxation but cannot credibly commit to future policies. Contrary to the case where only labour and capital income are taxed, the optimal time-consistent policies are remarkably...

In this paper we consider the implications of habits for optimal monetary policy, when those habits either exist at the level of the aggregate basket of consumption goods (`superficial' habits) or at the level of individual goods (`deep' habits: see Ravn, Schmitt-Grohe, and Uribe (2006))....

Recent work on optimal policy in sticky price models suggests that demand management through fiscal policy adds little to optimal monetary policy. We explore this consensus assignment in an economy subject to ‘deep’ habits at the level of individual goods where the counter-cyclicality of...

While consumption habits have been utilised as a means of generating a humpshaped output response to monetary policy shocks in sticky-price New Keynesian economies, there is relatively little analysis of the impact of habits (particularly,external habits) on optimal policy. In this paper we...