Should the generosity of unemployment benefits and the progressivity of income taxes depend on the presence of business cycles? This paper proposes a tractable model where there is a role for social insurance against uninsurable shocks to income and unemployment, as well as inefficient business...

We propose an integrated treatment of the problems of optimal monetary and fiscal policy, for an economy in which prices are sticky and the only available sources of government revenue are distorting taxes. Our linear-quadratic approach allows us to nest both conventional analyses of optimal...

Contents: Preface -- Part I: Imperfect information, responses to shocks, and credibility issues -- 1. Introduction, Part 1 -- 2. A basic model and some early results -- 3. The strategy of monetary policy: Targets, instruments and information variables -- 4. A variable price level, supply shocks...

Should the generosity of unemployment benefits and the progressivity of income taxes depend on the presence of business cycles? This paper proposes a tractable model where there is a role for social insurance against uninsurable shocks to income and unemployment, as well as inefficient business...