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...