The identification of an European business cycle has been inconclusive. Yet cyclical convergence is the key consideration for those countries that wish to be members of the currency union (e.g. UK). In general, countries will vary in the components and characteristics that make up their cycles...

Using a conventional model, this paper examines the conditions under which it is possible to stabilise both the output (inflation) cycle and the budget deficit/surplus of a regional economy in a wider currency union. We find that it is never possible. But we can approximate that result (for...

This article studies the impact of alternative institutional configurations on economic performance when there is strategic interaction between the government and the central bank. The interaction between the fiscal and monetary authorities is modeled as a non-cooperative two-stage game. The...

Monetary and fiscal policies interact in many ways. Recently, the stance of fiscal policy in a number of countries (including the EU and the US) has raised concerns about risks for the outcomes of monetary policy. Our paper first shows that these concerns are justified since - under an ambitious...

This paper generalizes and qualifies an influential monetary policy result due to Rogoff (1985) by taking fiscal policy, and fiscal-monetary interactions, into account. It shows that an appointment of a conservative central banker may, under a range of circum- stances, (i) increase the average...

An Independent Central Bank is often associated with being able to achieve low inflation and greater output stability than government run policies. In this paper we examine whether, and under what circumstances, an independent Central Bank can achieve both these targets with only one policy...

We generalize some recent results developed in static policy games with multiple players, to a dynamic context. We find that the classical theory of economic policy can be usefully applied to a strategic context of difference games: if one player satisfies the Golden Rule, then either all other...