This paper studies optimal monetary and fiscal policies in an economy à la Lucas and Stokey (1983) and Lagos and Wright (2005) with multiple cash and credit goods. We show that optimal policies are in general time inconsistent due to insufficient number of instruments to influence future...

I present a tractable dynamic model of political economy where disagreements about the composition of public spending result in implementation of short-sighted policies. The relative price of investment to consumption is excessively large in equilibrium due to over-taxation. Investment rates are...

When the government must decide not only on broad public-policy programs but also on the provision of group-specific public goods, dynamic strategic inefficiencies arise. The struggle between opposing groups–that disagree on the composition of expenditures and compete for office–results in...

This Paper analyses the optimal timing of taxes on capital income. We show that the celebrated result that taxes should front-loaded with an initially high tax followed by a discrete jump to the steady state is knife-edge, hinging on capital having a constant depreciation rate. An empirically...

This paper studies optimal taxation in a general equilibrium macro model with endogenous entry. We compare the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) model to three alternative demand structures: oligopolistic competition in prices, oligopolistic competition in quantities, and translog...

This paper compares the stochastic behavior of fiscal variables under optimal fiscal policy for the cases of full commitment by the government (Ramsey problem) and no commitment by the government (focusing on differentiable Markov perfect equilibrium). It shows that the cyclical properties of...

This paper analyses the political constraints of intergenerational risk sharing. The rst result is that the political process generally does not lead to ex ante optimal insurance. The second result is that in a second best political setting PAYG still contributes to intergenerational risk...

This paper explores the optimal risk sharing arrangement between generations in an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth.We allow for nonseparable preferences, paying particular attention to the risk aversion of the old as well as overall "life-cycle" risk aversion.We provide a...

In an endogenous growth model where the fiscal authority cannot commit to policy decisions beyond the current period, we explore the time-consistent optimal choice for two policy instruments: the income tax rate and the split of government spending between utility bearing consumption and...

The German Energiewende envisages achieving a climate-neutral building stock in 2050 by means of two major pillars of regulation: First, residential buildings should consume 80% less primary energy and, second, the remaining energy demand should be covered primarily with renewables. This paper...