Central banks typically find it difficult to turn off the "political pressure valve". This has important consequences for the types of monetary policies they implement. This paper presents an analysis of how political factors may come into play in the equilibrium determination of inflation. We...

We present an analysis of how political factors may come into play in the equilibrium determination of inflation. We employ a standard overlapping generations model with heterogenous young-age endowments, and a government that funds an exogenous spending via a combination of non-distortionary...

The Friedman rule, a widely studied prescription for monetary policy, is optimal inTownsend’s turnpike model of money; it is not so in the overlapping generations versionof his stochastic relocation model of money. We investigate these monetary models inthe light of this disparity. To that...

This paper takes a discrete-time adaptation of the continuous−time matching economy described in Pissarides (1990, 2000), and computes the solution to the dynamic planning problem. The solution is shown to be completely characterized by a first−order, non−linear map. We show that the map...

Central banks typically find it difficult to turn off the "political pressure valve". This has important consequences for the types of monetary policies they implement. This paper presents an analysis of how political factors may come into play in the equilibrium determination of inflation. We...

We study a variant of the conventional keeping-up-with-the-Joneses setup in whichheterogeneous-ability agents care both about consumption and leisure and receive anutility premium if their consumption exceeds that of the Joneses’. Unlike the conventionalsetup in which all agents are assumed to...

In an overlapping generations model, momentary equilibria are defined as points that lieon the intergenerational offer curve, i.e., they satisfy agents’ optimality conditions and marketclearing at any date. However, some dynamic sequences commencing from such points may notbe considered valid...

Much of Africa has been ravaged by the AIDS epidemic. There, heterosexual contactis the primary mode of transmission for the HIV virus. Even when access to condomsis good and their price low, a large fraction of young Africans continue to engage inunprotected sex. In this paper, we propose a...