This paper offers a critique of the macroeconomic policy stance of the U.K. Conservative administration from a policy optimization perspective. Attention is focused on three particular issues which, it is argued, require clarification in the medium term financial strategy. The first concerns the...

The potential instability of a fixed monetary rule combined with automatic fixed stabilisers is a well-established feature of closed economy IS/LM models with wealth effects and asset accumulation. This paper examines the stability issue in a general open economy macromodel with alternative...

With the adoption of an explicit inflation target in the UK, there has been renewed interest in the properties of alternative interest rate feedback rules. Following Svensson (1999), a literature examining the relative merits of inflation and price level targeting has also developed. In this...

Macromodels based on microfoundations represent the dominant approach in macroeconomics. These models appear to adopt a clear methodological approach, which promotes internal consistency above external consistency as a necessary condition of admissibility. This paper develops two arguments. The...

Recent attempts to incorporate optimal fiscal policy into New Keynesian models subject to nominal inertia, have tended to assume that policy makers are benevolent and have access to a commitment technology. A separate literature, on the New Political Economy, has focused on real economies where...

We consider optimal monetary and scal policies in a New Keynesian model of a small open economy with sticky prices and wages. In this benchmark setting monetary policy is all we need - analytical results demonstrate that variations in government spending should play no role in the stabilization...