We analyze how public debt evolves when successive policymakers have different policy goals and cannot make credible commitments about their future policies. We consider several cases to be able to disentangle and quantify the respective effects of imperfect commitment and political...

Due to time-inconsistency or policymakers' turnover, economic promises are not always fulfilled and plans are revised periodically. This fact is not accounted for in the commitment or the discretion approach. We consider two settings where the planner occasionally defaults on past promises. In...

This paper asks whether an aggressive monetary policy response to inflation is feasible in countries that suffer from fiscal dominance, as long as monetary policy also responds to fiscal variables. We find that if nominal interest rates are allowed to respond to government debt, even aggressive...