Consider the problem of a benevolent government that needs to finance the provision of a public good with distortionary taxes and cannot commit to policies beyond the current period. In such a case, public expenditure is inefficiently low. If the government further loses the ability to set tax...

Mortgage loans are a striking example of a persistent nominal rigidity. As a result, under incomplete markets, monetary policy affects decisions through the cost of new mortgage borrowing and the value of payments on outstanding debt. Observed debt levels and payment to income ratios suggest the...

Researchers have used cross-state differences to assess the jobs impact of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the Recovery Act). Existing studies find that the Act's broadly-directed spending (i.e. excluding tax cuts) increased employment, at a cost-per-job of roughly three to five...

We provide a quantitative evaluation of the aggregate and distributional impact of microfinance or credit programs targeted toward small businesses. We find that the redistributive impact of microfinance is stronger in general equilibrium than in partial equilibrium, but the impact on aggregate...

Compared to foreign grants, do concessional loans from foreign governments and/or unsubsidized loans from foreign private banks lead to faster growth in developing nations? The answer has implications for aid agencies (i) in allocating a given amount of resources between grants and concessional...

We study the use of intermediated assets as media of exchange in a neo-classical growth model. An intermediary is delegated control over productive capital and finances itself by issuing claims against the revenue generated by its operations. Unlike physical capital, intermediated claims are...

This paper uses several methods to study the interrelationship among Divisia monetary aggregates, prices, and income; allowing for non-stationary, non-linearities, asymmetries, and time-varying relationships among the series. We propose a multivariate regime switching unobserved components model...

Countries with more developed financial markets (as measured by the private debt-to-GDP ratio) tend to have significantly lower aggregate volatility. This relationship is also highly non-linear starting from a low level of financial development the reduction in aggregate volatility by financial...

In this paper, we study the welfare consequences of imposing alternative regimes of competition between two non-benevolent local governments that compete for mobile firms which have private information on their degree of locational attachment or home bias.In an environment in which politicians...

For economies in which the real rate of return on money is too low, the standard prescription is to deflate prices according to the Friedman rule. Implicit in this recommendation is the availability of a lump-sum tax instrument. In this paper, I view lump-sum tax obligations as a form of debt...