Many traditional macroeconomic models do not have determinate predictions for the path of inflation: even for a given specification of money supplies, many paths of inflation are consistent with equilibrium. According to the fiscal theory of the price level, fiscal policy can be used to select...

We consider a class of dynamic games in which each player’s actions are unobservable to the other players and each player’s actions can influence a state variable that is unobservable to the other players. We develop an algorithm that solves for the subset of sequential equilibria in which...

In this paper, I consider the problem of optimal unemployment insurance in a world in which the unemployed agent's job-finding effort is unobservable and his level of savings is unobservable. I show that the first-order approach is not always valid for this problem, and I argue that the...

This paper provides a new rationalization for deposit insurance and systemic disintermediations. I consider an environment in which borrowers face no penalty for failing to repay obligations except the loss of their collateral. I assume that this collateral has aggregate risk. For a subset of...

We compare the empirical performance of a standard incomplete markets asset pricing model with that of a novel model with constrained Pareto-optimal allocations. We represent the models' stochastic discount factors in terms of the cross-sectional distribution of consumption and use these...

This introduces the symposium on monetary and macro economics.

asset income tax in this system is zero.

In this paper, we use data from developing countries to argue that sovereign defaults are often caused by fiscal pressures generated by large-scale domestic defaults. We argue that these systemic domestic defaults are caused by shocks best interpreted as being non-fundamental. We construct a...

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