This paper uses an intertemporal model of public finances to show that political instability can cause taxes to be tilted to the future, resulting in a fiscal deficit that is suboptimal and only weakly sustainable (in the sense of Quintos). This occurs because political instability gives the...

Models of wage indexation uniformly have been based on the simplifying assumption that nominal wages adjust upward or downward symmetrically with unexpected price increases or decreases. Indexation typically is asymmetric in actual contracts, however. Wages are indexed to price increases but not...

This article explores the macroeconomic role that risk plays using the BAA-AAA spread as the measure of risk. First, it shows that meaningful upward movements in this spread are associated with recessions and their severity. Second, it includes the BAA-AAA spread in a structural...

This paper employs tests for Granger-Sims causality and a four-variable vector-autoregression (VAR) to examine whether real government spending and real net taxes have any systematic effect on output purchased by the private sector. The paper finds no evidence of causality from government...