Fiscal Policy and Optimal Monetary Rules in a non Ricardian Economy

We study in this article how the conduct of fiscal policy interacts with the choice of oprimal monetary rules by a central bank. We consider a non Ricardian model with nondistortionary fiscal policyt, and compare two policy packages, one where fiscal and monetary policy are simultaneously optimized, and one where the monetary policy is optimized under a given fiscal policy. We find a number of results that would not appear in the traditional Ricardian framework: (a) the optimal monetary rule may be activist when fiscal policy is kept constant, whereas it is not when combined with optimal fiscal policy; (b) combining optimally fiscal and monetary policies may lead to far superior outcomes, even when, following Sargent and Wallace (1975), government is allowed to react to much less information. (Copyright: Elsevier)