This paper is about the effectiveness of qualitative easing; a government policy that is designed to mitigate risk through central bank purchases of privately held risky assets and their replacement by government debt, with a return that is guaranteed by the taxpayer. Policies of this kind have...

This paper uses the old-Keynesian representative agent model developed in Farmer (2010) to answer two questions: 1) do increased government purchases crowd out private consumption? 2) do increased government purchases reduce unemployment? Farmer compared permanent tax financed expenditure paths...

The Stability and Growth Pact is under fire. Problems have appeared in sticking to the rules. Proposals to reform the Pact or ditch it altogether abound. But is the Pact a flawed fiscal rule? Against established criteria for an ideal fiscal rule, its design and compliance mechanisms fare...

During the ‘Golden Age’ that lasted until the mid-1970s, Europe witnessed a "public finance" phase, when the three sides of Musgrave’s triangle - allocative efficiency, redistribution and cyclical stabilisation - seemed to reinforce one another. EMU's fiscal rules - embodied in the...

This paper uses a model with a continuum of equilibrium unemployment rates to explore the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The existence of multiple steady states is explained by a model of costly search and recruiting that leads to a situation of bilateral monopoly. Using this framework, I...

The Stability and Growth Pact has been under fire ever since it was born. But is the Pact a flawed fiscal rule? Against established criteria for an ideal fiscal rule, its design and compliance mechanisms show strengths and weaknesses. The latter tend to reflect trade-offs typical of...

Under the Stability and Growth Pact, countries are committed to achieving medium-term budget positions of “close to balance or in surplus”. The rationale for this commitment is that such budgetary positions would allow for the full working of the built-in stabilizers without triggering the...