This paper develops a model of optimal debt maturity in which the government cannot issue statecontingent debt. As the literature has established, if the government can perfectly commit to fiscal policy, it fully insulates the economy against government spending shocks by purchasing short-term...

This paper develops a model of optimal debt maturity in which the government cannot issue statecontingent debt. As the literature has established, if the government can perfectly commit to fiscal policy, it fully insulates the economy against government spending shocks by purchasing short-term...

Government debt and redistributive taxation can help people to smooth consumption when facing uninsurable individual specific risk. I examine the effects that variations in public debt and transfers have on risk sharing, efficiency, and the distribution of resources. I find that risk sharing can...

This paper investigates methods of assessing dynamic efficiency, points out their shortcomings and develops a new criterion of determining whether or not an economy accumulates too much capital. This criterion is then applied to the OECD countries as well as China. The analysis sheds a new light...

Fiscal policy is needed to avoid dynamic inefficiency and maintain full employment in a modified Diamond OLG model with imperfect competition. A distributionally neutral tax scheme can maintain full employment in the face of variations in household confidence. No variations in taxes will be...

This paper analyzes the impact of consumer uncertainty on optimal fiscal policy in a model with capital. The consumers lack confidence about the probability model that characterizes the stochastic environment and so apply a max-min operator to their optimization problem. An altruistic fiscal...