Discretionary policymakers cannot manage private-sector expectations and cannot coordinate the actions of future policymakers. As a consequence, expectations traps and coordination failures can occur and multiple equilibria can arise. In order to utilize the explanatory power of models with...

This paper studies the interactions of fiscal policy and monetary policy when they stabilize a single economy against shocks in a dynamic setting. If both policy-makers are benevolent, then, in our model, the best outcome is achieved when monetary policy does nearly all of the stabilization. If...