This paper investigates the stability of households' consumption behaviour in France through a prcedure of discriminating between feedback and feedforward models connected to the notions of encompassing in invariance initially proposed by Hendry (1988).

In this paper, we study the intertemporal equilibria of an infinite-lived representative agent model with public debt. We show that for a given path of government expenditures, there generally exist a continuum of equilibria depending on various debt policies.

What are the cyclical properties of U.S. state and local government fiscal policy? The budget surplus of local and, in particular, state governments is procyclical, smoothing disposable income and consumption of state residents. This happens over both short- and medium-term horizons. Procyclical...

The paper studies optimal redistributive taxation when the government cannot commit the future policy. The framework used is one in which individuals can revise their consumption-savings decisions slightly more often than the government can change tax policy.

This paper analyses a growth model wherein saving results from bequest-as-consumption. It first looks at the market equilibrium and at the optimal solution. Then it turns to the issue of decentralizing the optimal solution with various taxes and transfers. Depending on the available instruments,...

Starting with a theoretical QUAIDS model at the micro level, an approximate aggregation is developed that allows the model to be applied to time series at the macro level (The approximated aggregation holds for a "representative" consumer with utility equal to the harmonic mean of the individual...

A controversial result of some current research on the real business cycles is the claim that a common stochastic trend(the cumulative effect of permanent shocks to productivity)underlies the bulk of economic fluctuations. If confirmed, this will imply that many other forces have been relatively...

The degree of substitution between private and public per capita consumption for the G7 countries is estimated over the period 1960 to 1996. Special attention is given to isolating both long-run and short-run substitution effects.

This paper uses household level unit record data from South Africa to examine the behavioural and welfare impacts of private and public transfers. The study also examines the effect of economies of household size on the incidence of poverty. The exercise is based on a three stage least squares...

This paper shows that growth models featuring the representative consumer (RC) assumption can generate rich dynamics for the cross- sections of consumption, wealth and income.