We study fiscal and monetary policy in a monetary union with the potential for rollover crises in sovereign debt markets. Member-country fiscal authorities lack commitment to repay their debt and choose fiscal policy independently. A common monetary authority chooses inflation for the union,...

We provide an introduction to optimal fiscal and monetary policy using the primal approach to optimal taxation. We use this approach to address how fiscal and monetary policy should be set over the long run and over the business cycle. We find four substantive lessons for policymaking: Capital...

The desirability of fiscal constraints in monetary unions depends critically on whether the monetary authority can commit to follow its policies. If it can commit, then debt constraints can only impose costs. If it cannot commit, then fiscal policy has a free-rider problem, and debt constraints...

In this paper we analyze the efficacy of seignorage as a tax associated with various monetary arrangements in a computable general equilibrium model. For the economies examined, we find that seignorage tax is not a good one relative to a tax on labor income. If the after-tax real return is –5...

This paper develops the quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model. In a stationary equilibrium the ex ante tax rate on capital income is approximately zero. There is an equivalence class of ex post capital income tax rates and bond policies that support a given...

We show that optimal monetary and fiscal policies are time consistent for a class of economies often used in applied work, economies appealing because they are consistent with the growth facts. We establish our results in two steps. We first show that for this class of economies, the Friedman...

We examine the limiting behavior of cooperative and noncooperative fiscal policies as countries’ market power goes to zero. We show that these policies converge if countries raise revenues through lump-sum taxation. However, if there are unremovable domestic distortions, such as distorting...

We analyze a real business cycle model in which the government optimally chooses public investment and nonmilitary current expenditures, to maximize the welfare of the representative private agent. We characterize the optimal response of endogenous spending to shocks to technology and to...

This paper develops a two-sector neoclassical model of international trade with endogenous capital accumulation and intertemporal optimization. In contrast to the traditional “2x2x2” model, there is a Ricardian implication that countries specialize according to comparative advantage....

In this paper we use the common perspective provided by the neoclassical growth model to evaluate the size of the distortions associated with different monetary and fiscal policies designed to finance a given sequence of government expenditures. We construct an artificial monetary economy...