Balanced-Budget Rules and Aggregate Instability: The Role of Consumption Taxes in a Monetary Economy

This paper examines the stabilizing property of consumption taxation in a balanced-budget setting of a neoclassical one-sector cash-in-advance economy. We find that saddle-path stability is not a necessary outcome even though the utility function is additively separable between consumption and leisure. Both the existence of a Laffer curve and the indeterminacy outcome of consumption taxation depend on the elasticities of intertemporal substitution in consumption and of labor supply. Numerical examples show that consumption tax may lead to aggregate instability for the OECD countries under the current over-easy monetary policies.