Every country faces what economists call an intertemporal (across time) budget constraint, which requires that its government's future expenditures, including the servicing of its outstanding official debt, be covered by its government's future receipts when measured in present value. The...

A model linking macroeconomic phenomena and income distribution in balanced growth equilibria is developed as a variant to the Kaldor model of factor shares. It departs from the original Kaldor model in assuming equal savings rates and production determined by a matching process between workers...

Is there a role for debt beyond curing overaccumulation of capital? Does dynamic efficiency and the infeasibility of debt Ponzi schemes eliminate any Pareto-improving role for a government in a competitive economy with complete markets? Is there an optimal maturity structure of public debt?...

We consider a dynamic general equilibrium model with collective wage bargaining and investigate how unemployment dynamics are affected by two types of budgetary policies. In line with traditional reasoning, a balanced-budget rule amplifies fluctuations in the short run, whereas an...

Pre-Accession Transition Countries (PATCs) aim at early admittance to the monetary club. Their fiscal indicators - deficit and debt - do not show any serious symptoms. Closer scrutiny reveals, however, that the interest burden of their public debt might be underestimated, and that restructuring...

We consider the properties of two monetary policy rules ("strict inflation targeting", "constant money growth rule") in an intertemporal equilibrium model with flexible prices in which monetary policy is "active", while fiscal policy is "passive". Specifically, we assume that the fiscal agent...

EMU driven interest rate convergence has led to a significant reduction of borrowing costs for some European governments in the second half of the nineties. The paper deals with the possible consequences for deficit behaviour. Although the impact of interest rates on deficits is a crucial...