This paper studies optimal fiscal and monetary policy.

This paper studies optimal fiscal and monetary policy under sticky product prices. The theoretical framework is a stochastic production economy without capital. The government finances an exogenous stream of purchases by levying distortionary income taxes, printing money, and issuing one-period...

This paper compares the welfare costs of business cycles in a dollarized economy to those arising in economies with different monetary arrangements. The alternative monetary policy regimes studied belong to three broad families: devaluation rate rules, inflation targeting, and money growth rate...

This paper studies the business-cycle fluctuations predicted by a two-sector endogenous-business-cycle model with sector-specific external increasing returns to scale. It focuses on aspects of actual fluctuations that have been identified both as defining features of the business cycle and as...

This paper analyzes the implications of a balanced-budget fiscal policy rule for price-level determination in a cash-in-advance economy under three alternative monetary policy regimes. It shows that the price level is indeterminate under a nominal interest rate peg and determinate under a money...

Since John Taylor's (1993) seminal paper, a large literature has argued that active interest rate feedback rules, that is, rules that respond to increases in inflation with a more than one-for-one increase in the nominal interest rate, are stabilizing. In this paper, we argue that once the zero...

As the millennium draws to an end, the threat posed by the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem is inducing vast private and public spending on its remediation. In this paper, we model the Y2K problem as an anticipated, permanent loss in output whose magnitude can be lessened by investing resources in...

In this paper, we characterize conditions under which interest rate feedback rules that set the nominal interest rate as an increasing function of the inflation rate induce aggregate instability by generating multiple equilibria. We show that these conditions depend not only on the...

A key result of a recent literature that focuses on the global consequences of Taylor-type interest rate feedback rules is that such rules in combination with the zero bound on nominal interest rates can lead to unintended liquidity traps. An immediate question posed by this result is whether...

This paper compares the welfare costs of business cycles in a dollarized economy to those arising in economies with different monetary arrangements. The alternative monetary policy regimes studied belong to three broad families: devaluation rate rules, inflation targeting, and money growth rate...