The commitment ability of governments is neither infinite nor zero but intermediate. In this paper, we determine the commitment ability that a government needs to implement a unique equilibrium outcome and rule out undesired self-fulfilling expectations. We first show that, in a large class of...

We consider a neoclassical growth model with quasi-hyperbolic discounting under Kantian optimization: each temporal self acts in a way that they would like every future self to act. We introduce the notion of a Kantian policy as an outcome of Kantian optimization in a given class of policies. We...

In the wake of rising inflation in the aftermath of unprecedented debt financed stimulus packages, we ask: Can governments use real bonds (TIPS) as part of their debt portfolio to commit to stable inflation rates? We propose a novel framework of optimal debt management in the presence of sticky...

We analyze optimal capital and labor taxes in a model where (i) the government makes noncontingent announcements about future policies and (ii) ex-post statecontingent deviations from these announcements are costly. With Full Commitment, optimal fiscal announcements are unbiased forecasts of...

Households regularly fail to make optimal financial decisions. But what are the underlying reasons for this? Using two conceptually distinct measures of time inconsistency based on bank account transaction data and behavioral measurement experiments, we show that the excessive use of bank...

Bolivia has achieved noteworthy success over the past 15 years in raising incomes, reducing poverty, and maintaining macroeconomic stability by deploying commodity revenues to finance transfers, public investment, and state-led development, using an exchange rate peg as a policy anchor. However,...

This paper investigates the effects of members' exits from a currency union on the credibility of the common currency. In our currency union model, the inflation rate of the common currency is determined by majority voting among N member countries that are heterogeneous with respect to their...

Households regularly fail to make optimal financial decisions. But what are the underlying reasons for this? Using two conceptually distinct measures of time inconsistency based on bank account transaction data and behavioral measurement experiments, we show that the excessive use of bank...