We present a monetary endogenous growth model and analyze the effects of fiscal and monetary policy with real money as an argument in the utility function. We show that a balanced government budget gives a higher balanced growth rate and lower inflation than a situation with permanent public deficits. It also leads to higher welfare compared to a situation with permanent deficits where the gove...

In the 1970s, taxation of "windfall" profits from primary products and intervention in trade and production tempted governments into expansionary fiscal policies, whilst stifling the private sector and depressing growth. However, the experience of the recent coffee boom has so far been more favourable: those African countries which liberalized and left a large share of the “windfall” with the p...

This study assesses the short and long-run behaviour of long-term sovereign bond yields in OECD countries, for the period 1973-2008. We employ a dynamic panel approach to reflect financial and economic integration, and to increase the performance and accuracy of the tests. Given the existence of cross-country dependence regarding sovereign yields and its determinants, we resort to simulation an...

According to the financial accelerator model, a small monetary or other shock is amplified through credit market restrictions on small firms, and swings in balance sheets over the business cycle cause swings in small firms’ spending. This paper incorporates these notions in an empirical model of firm behavior. We use unit transaction cost of debt and rationed credit as indicators of balance she...

We study optimal government policy in an economy where (i) search frictions create a coordination problem and generate multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria and (ii) the government finances the provision of a public good by taxing trade. The government must choose the tax rate before it knows which equilibrium will obtain, and therefore an important part of the problem is determining how the policy...

This paper analyzes the effects of time-consistent capital taxation on the level of capital and welfare. We find that a commitment to a zero capital tax shifts the time inconsistency problem towards labor taxes and the provision of public consumption. By comparing the worst timeconsistent policies with and without a commitment to zero capital taxes, we find that the mere existence of a capital ...

What are the impacts on household incomes of the major economic downturn that occurred in almost all OECD countries starting in late 2007? This paper is a condensed version of a public lecture given at the University of Melbourne in honour of R. I. Downing. It draws on a study of 21 rich countries using data from national accounts, household surveys, and other sources. The headline findings are...

To understand the effect of fiscal policy on the private sector we have to comprehend how expectations about fiscal variables are formed. However, little is known about the way people form expectations about fiscal variables: no undercutting theory exists, not to say empirical evidence. The problem is that “expectations are unobservable” (Bertola and Drazen [BD93, p.16]). We generate observable...

The purpose of this study is to provide a macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy in the Czech Republic during the transformation period 1989-1995. In contrast to those studies which are based on “decline accounting”, disentangling different factors from each other and ascribing to them specific roles in the overall decline, this study focuses exclusively on fiscal policy and tries to identify ...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper investigates the relation between growth forecast ...