This paper undertakes a normative investigation of the quantitative properties of optimal tax smoothing in a business cycle model with state contingent debt, capital-skill complementarity and endogenous skill acquisition under technology and public expenditure shocks. We find that skilled and...

Allowing habits to be formed at the level of individual goods – deep habits - can radically alter the fiscal policy transmission mechanism as the counter-cyclicality of mark-ups this implies can result in government spending crowding-in rather than crowding-out private consumption in the short...

This paper contributes to the on-going empirical debate regarding the role of the RBC model and in particular of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks in explaining aggregate fluctuations. To achieve this, we estimate the model's posterior density using Bayesian methods. Within this...