Government bonds are interest-bearing assets. Increasing public debt increases income, wealth, and consumption demand. The smaller government expenditure is, the larger consumption demand must be in equilibrium, and the larger must be public debt. Conversely, lower public debt implies higher...

Economists are widely familiar with the Ricardian equivalence thesis. It maintains that, given the time-path of government spending, a change in taxation does not alter the set of feasible life-time consumption plans of the households and affects neither the demand for commodities and services...

This paper shows that important insights for fiscal policy can be derived from Joseph Schumpeter's academic work. This concerns his fundamental distinction between theories in which the monetary sphere is identical with the real sphere ("real analysis"), and theories in which financial sphere is...

This article aims to develop the theoretical overlapping generation models with the unstable healthcare system due to the problem of missing trading markets between young and old generations. The main healthcare system in Thailand is Universal Coverage (UC) which covers around 48 million Thai...

This paper focuses on the observed empirical relationship between fiscal rules and budget deficits, and examines whether this correlation is driven by an omitted variable, namely voter preferences. We make use of two different estimation methods to capture voter preferences in a panel of Swiss...

The paper generalizes Feldstein's criticism (Perceived Wealth in Bonds and Social Security, 1976) of Barro's analysis (Are Government Bonds Real Net Wealth?, 1974) for the case that the interest rate exceeds the growth rate. This is done by considering an economy in steady state where all agents...

This note generalizes Feldstein's (1976) criticism of Barro's(1974) analysis for the case that the interest rate exceeds the growth rate. This is done by considering an economy in steady state where all agents hold "Barro expectations": they believe that government debt must necessarily be...

This paper focuses on the problems involved in developing cross-country comparisons of the intergenerational stance of fiscal policy. Of course, these comparisons are nowadays based on the method of generational accounting and in particular most of them rely on comparing the total size of...