This paper investigates the implications of budgetary policies for consumption and economic growth. We present a model that combines the Arrow-Romer endogenous growth model with the Blanchard-Yaari overlapping-generations model. We show that a rise in government debt, financed by lump-sum taxes,...

If a nation fails to satisfy its intertemporal budget constraint (IBC) then, like a government or a household, either it will become insolvent or it can consume more of its income. The main purpose of this paper is to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for a nation to satisfy its IBC,...

The trade-off between interest rate variability and the width of an exchange rate target zone is examined, using the regulated Brownian motion model of target zones. It is shown that for narrow exchange rate bands, and for reasonable parameter values, the interest rate differential's asymptotic...

This paper distinguishes between some obvious necessary and sufficient conditions for adopting the target zone proposal as a means of improving macroeconomic performance. The necessary conditions may be satisfied fairly easily, but it is a good deal more difficult to design a targeting system...

The paper provides a synthesis of recent research relating to supply side policy in the 1930s in a period when government sought to raise prices given sticky wages. We argue that as a politically constrained strategy to limit rises in unemployment this made sense. A bargaining model approach...

This paper proposes a model of endogenous growth with diversifiable uncertainty, irreversible investment decisions and imperfect labour mobility. Obstacles to labour reallocation lower the operating profits earned by existing firms and increase the cost of creating new ones, thus reducing...

This paper shows that when workers have some market power and face substantial uncertainty concerning their productivity, it may be in their interest to formulate their wage claims with a view to the information thereby revealed. This learning behaviour may in turn be responsible for...

We study the behaviour of secondary market prices for the debt of seven LDCs for the period March 1986 through November 1989 (monthly data). These prices for long-term debt appear to be driven by a set of `common factors' across countries. One of these is the interest rate, Libor; we found a...

Despite the well known gains from trade, trade liberalization is one of the most politically contentious actions that a government can undertake. We propose and formalize a new explanation of this unpopularity. The explanation is based on uncertainty and is complementary to the usual...

The two central economic problems facing Hungary are its large foreign debt and its relatively poor rate of growth over the 1980s. The paper examines some of the reform issues facing Hungary, starting with the tax reforms of 1988 and 1989, but concentrating on the importance of creating...