We study stationary discretionary equilibria in dynamic linear-quadratic rational expectations models. Past papers have assumed that this is uniquely determined; we show that such models can have multiple equilibria in some situations. We demonstrate the existence of multiple discretionary...

The paper compares the policy choices regarding risk-transfer against low-probability-high-loss events between elected and appointed public officials. Empirical evidence using data on U.S. municipality-level shows that appointed city managers are more likely to adopt federal risk-transfer...

Committee decision making is examined in this study focusing on the role assigned to the committee members. In particular, we are concerned about the comparison between committee performance under specialization and non-specialization of the decision makers. -- project selection ; public policy...

This paper studies the design of optimal time-consistent monetary policy in an economy where the planner trusts its own model, while a representative household uses a set of alternative probability distributions governing the evolution of the exogenous state of the economy. In such environments,...

Several recent papers are devoted to the examination of the central banker's behaviour in an uncertain economic environment. This paper proposes, from a central banker's point of view, a synthesis of the main sources of uncertainty as well as an illustration of their effects within an analytical...

Robust control theory is a tool for assessing decision rules when a decision maker distrusts either the specification of transition laws or the distribution of hidden state variables or both. Specification doubts inspire the decision maker to want a decision rule to work well for a ∅ of models...

Unintended consequences manifest themselves in many aspects of socioeconomic life. We develop a model of unintended consequences (UC) of novel policies. In our setup, the policymaker is unaware of the UC of her policy. We discuss several approaches to evaluating policy in terms of welfare...