The potential interactions among fiscal policies, investments and economicgrowth are complex and manifold.In this paper, we will perform a systematic comparative analysis of the variouseconomic insights that arecurrently available on these complex relationships, both theoretically (by aselective...

Uncertainty about the future preferences of the government may induce policy makers to run excessive budget deficits. As a solution to this problem, economists have proposed to impose a binding debt rule. In this paper we argue that a binding debt rule does not eliminate the distortions due to...

We study optimal government spending in a business cycle model with frictional unemployment. The Ramsey optimal policy is contrasted with a reference policy which would be first best in a frictionless economy. Results are: the Ramsey policy i) implies a higher steady state ratio of government...

This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

Recent macro developments in the euro area have highlighted the interactions between fiscal policy, sovereign debt, and financial fragility. We take a structural macroeconomic model with frictions in the financial intermediation process, in line with recent research, but introduce asset choice...

Societies often rely on simple rules to restrict the size and behavior of governments. When fiscal and monetary policies are conducted by a discretionary and profligate government, I find that revenue ceilings vastly outperform debt, deficit and monetary rules, both in effectiveness at curbing...

We argue that the fiscal multiplier of government purchases is increasing in the spending shock, in contrast to what is assumed in most of the literature. The fiscal multiplier is largest for large positive government spending shocks and smallest for large contractions in government spending. We...

The aggregate capital stock in a nation can be overaccumulated for many different reasons. This paper studies which policy or policy mix is more effective in achieving the socially optimal (golden rule) level of aggregate capital stock in an infinite-horizon heterogeneous-agents...

The rapidly growing national debt in the U.S. since the 1970s has alarmed and intrigued the academic world. Consequently, the concept of dynamic (in)efficiency in an overlapping generations (OLG) world and the importance of the heterogeneous-agents and incomplete markets (HAIM) hypothesis to...