Keynesian concepts of probability and uncertainty emphasize the basis of knowledge available to economic decision makers. Conditions of uncertainty, which involve missing evidence or doubtful arguments, are distinguished from probable risk. Beyond this, on the basis of the claim that the future...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the short‐term macroeconomic effects of the fiscal policy in Colombia for the 1980‐2007 period using a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model. Design/methodology/approach – The authors' benchmark is a five‐variable SVAR model which...

The Bretton Woods agreements set up the post‐war monetary order on the basis of fixed exchange rates and autonomous national economic policy. Changes in parity were allowed in the case of fundamental disequilibrium, but this concept was not defined, promoting a lengthy but sterile debate. This...

This paper examines the role for tax policies in productivity-shock driven economies with "catching-up-with-the-Joneses" utility functions. The optimal tax policy is shown to affect the economy counter-cyclically via procyclical taxes, i.e., "cooling down" the economy with higher taxes when it...

This paper discusses prior elicitation for the parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and provides a method for constructing prior distributions for a subset of these parameters from beliefs about the moments of the endogenous variables. The empirical application...

This paper presents a sequential model suited to analyze transitions between equilibria. Disequilibrium dynamics are obtained from a standard monopolistic competition model, by introducing a sequential structure and reasonable hypotheses about technology, finance constraints, expectation...

Purpose – The Saint Valentine's Decree (1984) and the ensuing hard‐fought referendum (1985), which reduced the automatisms of scala mobile , started a process of redefinition of wage fixing in Italy, which culminated with the final abolition of scala mobile (1992) and the approval of...

We build an agent-based model to study how _scal multipliers can change over the business cycle. Our approach considers the economy as a complex evolving system. In that, _scal state-dependent multipliers are emergent disequilibrium phenomenon stemming from the interaction among an ecology of...