In this paper we study how a benevolent government that cannot commit to future policy should trade off the costs and benefits of public expenditure. We characterize and solve for Markov-perfect equilibria of the dynamic game between successive governments. The characterization consists of an...

How should aggregate public expenditures be traded off against their financing costs? We incorporate public expenditures into a standard neoclassical growth setup with model policy choice as made by a government choosing tax rates and spending so that the resulting competitive equilibrium...

In this paper we study how a benevolent government that cannot commit to future policy should trade off the costs and benefits of public expenditure. We characterize and solve for Markov-perfect equilibria of the dynamic game between successive governments. The characterization consists of an...

This is a specific investigation of the importance of technological change specific to new investment goods for postwar U.S. aggregate fluctuations. A growth model that incorporates this form of technological change is calibrated to U.S. data and simulated, using the relative price of new...

The role that investment-specific technological change played in generating postwar US growth is investigated here. The premise is that the introduction of new, more efficient capital goods is an important source of productivity change, and an attempt is made to disentangle its effects from the...