The microeconomic foundations provided by the 'disequilibrium' macro-modelling approach of Barro-Grossman-Malinvaud are used to compare the performance of government spending and taxation as instruments of fiscal demand management in achieving a welfare optimum. Spending is successively treated...

A dynamic, stochastic optimizing macromodel with predetermined money wages and labour market monopoly power is used to examine the effect on current macroeconomic variables of a temporary increase in variability of the future money supply. As a benchmark, we show that under perfect wage-price...

The theoretical determinants of maximum sustainable government debt are investigated using Diamond's overlapping-generations model. A level of debt is defined to be 'sustainable' if a steady state with non-degenerate values of economic variables exists. We show that a maximum sustainable level...

A sizeable literature examines exchange rate pass-through to disaggregated import prices but very few micro-studies focus on consumer prices. This paper explores exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices in South Africa during 2002-2007, using a unique data set of highly disaggregated data...

A dynamic stochastic model of a small open monetary economy with infinitely-lived optimizing households is constructed. There are temporary nominal rigidities in the labour market, while in goods and asset markets prices are flexible. Optimizing behaviour in the foreign country is also modelled....

Monetary and fiscal policy are introduced into a version of Hart's "Keynesian features" model of imperfect competition. Individuals' labour supply is exogenous, so, under perfect competition, output is always at the exogenous "full employment" level. Imperfect competition takes the form of...

This survey outlines the general lessons of the recent literature on imperfectly competitive macroeconomies for the theory of monetary and fiscal policy. A general framework is presented which encompasses most of the existing literature. Although money is of itself neutral in these models, the...

We re-examine optimal monetary policy in a dynamic general equilibrium model where open market operations are the only policy instrument. The government optimizes purely over private agents’ welfare. We use a money-in-the-utility-function approach with a welfare cost of ‘current’...

As a companion to a previous paper, monetary and fiscal policy are analyzed in (a) a small open economy and (b) a two-country world, where in addition to a fixed wage causing unemployment, countries now produce specialized products whose prices are fixed, causing excess supply. There are two...

We study the output costs of a reduction in monetary growth in a dynamic general equilibrium model with staggered wages. As in John Taylor’s approach, the money wage is fixed for two periods, but in our model it is also chosen according to intertemporal optimization, as are consumption and...