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...

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...

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, as in the case of the absolute mean deviation, it...

Given a set of elements, each having a profit and cost associated with it, and a budget, the 0-1 knapsack problem finds a subset of the elements with maximum possible combined profit subject to the combined cost not exceeding the budget. In this paper we study a stochastic version of the problem...