Debt neutrality is said to occur if, given a program for public spending on current goods and services over time, the real equilibrium of the economy (private consumption, investment, relative prices, etc.) is independent of the pattern of government borrowing and lump-sum taxation over time....

The paper analyzes the role of differences in household behavior as a source of persistent and even permanent differences between national or regional productivity growth rates, when there are constant static returns to scale in production and costless international diffusion of technology. A...

The paper presents a non-technical survey of some of the issues involved in the design of stabilization policy 10 developng countries with special emphasis on policy responses to external shocks. First, the six imost imortant external economic parameters of developing countries are reviewed; I)...

The recent theory of exchange rate dynamics within a target zone holds that exchange rates under a currency bard are less responsive to fundamental shocks than exchange rates under a free float, provided that the intervention rules of the Central Bank(s) are common knowledge. These results are...

The setup of the paper is as follows: Section I presents a fairly standard, small deterministic macromodel with a number of classical features. All markets clear instantaneously, there is no money illusion, and perfect foresight rules. The effects of monetary, financial, and fiscal policies in...

If price decisions are taken neither continuously nor in perfect synchronization, the process of adjustment of all prices to a new nominal level will imply temporary movements in relative prices. It might then well be that, to avoid these movements in relative prices, each price setter will want...

The USA is in the middle of the pack of industrial countries as regards the public debt-GOP and public deficit-GOP ratios. The period since 1980 is the only peace-time period outside the Great Depression to see a sustained increase in the debt-GOP ratio. The budgetary retrenchment planned by the...

The paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing policy formation among independent authorities operating in an interdependent environment. This is then applied to the analysis of optimal monetary policy in a stochastic two-country model with rational expectations. The main conclusions...

The paper studies the effects of alternative financing policies in the open economy.There is a non-trivial role for financial policy because of the failure of first-order debt neutrality due to uncertain private lifetimes. Both the single-country case and the interdependent two-country case are...

This paper considers the effects of fiscal and financial policy on economic growth in open and closed economies, when human capital formation by young households is constrained by the illiquidity of human wealth. Both endogenous and exogenous growth versions of the basic OLG model are analyzed....