The initial government debt-to-GDP ratio and the government's commitment play a pivotal role in determining the welfare-optimal speed of fiscal consolidation in the management of a debt crisis. Under commitment, for low or moderate initial government debt-to-GPD ratios, the optimal consolidation...

The initial government debt-to-GDP ratio and the government's commitment play a pivotal role in determining the welfare-optimal speed of fiscal consolidation in the management of a debt crisis. Under commitment, for low or moderate initial government debt-to-GPD ratios, the optimal consolidation...

Most DSGE models and methods make inappropriate asymmetric information assumptions. They assume that all economic agents have full access to measurement of all variables and past shocks, whereas the econometricians have no access to this. An alternative assumption is that there is symmetry, in...

This paper compares two contrasting approaches to robust monetary policy design. The first developed by Hansen and Sargent (2003, 2007) assumes unstructured model uncertainty and uses a minimax robustness criterion to design monetary rules. This contrasts with an older literature that structures...

We examine the linear-quadratic (LQ) approximation of non-linear stochastic dynamic optimization problems in macroeconomics, in particular for monetary policy. We make four main contributions: first, we draw attention to a general Hamiltonian framework for LQ approximation due toMagill (1977)....

The objectives of this paper are : first, to quantify the stabilization welfare gains from commitment; second, to examine how commitment to an optimal rule can be sustained as an equilibrium and third, to find a simple interest rate rule that closely approximates the optimal commitment one. We...