Policy agenda research is concerned with measuring the policymaker activities. Topic classification has proven a valuable tool for policy agenda research. However, manual topic coding is extremely costly and time-consuming. Supervised topic classification offers a cost-effective and reliable alternative, yet it introduces new challenges, the most significant of which are the training set coding...

In this paper we modify the method of Blanchard and Quah (1989) in order to estimate a structural VAR model appropriate for a small open economy. In this way we identify shocks to output and prices in the members of the two monetary unions that make up the African CFA Franc Zone. The costs of monetary union membership will depend on the extent to which price and output shocks are correlated acr...

Decentralized Trust Management, originally introduced by the PolicyMaker and SDSI prototypes, and currently promoted at least by the KeyNote2, SPKI, and TeSSA development efforts, provides a means of distributed authorization that seems to be especially suitable for distributed object systems and agent based systems. In this paper we introduce the SIESTA project, which studies how to integrate ...

We study the best sustainable equilibrium in an economy with non-benevolent policymakers who lack commitment and have private information. In this environment, households discipline policymakers by threatening to remove them from power. Policymakers are never replaced and there are no distortions to production if there is perfect information. We present three results which emerge once private i...

This paper uses a New Keynesian framework to study the coordination of fiscal and monetary policies, in response to an inflation shock when the policymaker acts with commitment. We first show that, in the simplest New Keynesian model, fiscal policy plays no part in the optimal policy response, because of the comparative advantage which monetary policy has in the control of inflation. We the...

We study the interaction of multiple large economies in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. Each economy has a monetary policymaker that attempts to control the economy through the use of a linear nominal interest rate feedback rule. We show how the determinacy of worldwide equilibrium depends on the joint behavior of policymakers worldwide. We also show how indeterminacy exposes all econom...

The tendency to foreshorten time units as we peer further into the future provides an explanation for hyperbolic discounting at an inter-generational time scale. We study implications of hyperbolic discounting for climate change policy, when the probability of a climate-induced catastrophe depends on the stock of greenhouse gasses. We characterize the set of Markov perfect equilibria (MPE) of t...

We study a political economy model of entry barriers. Each period the policymaker determines whether to impose a high barrier to entry, and the special interest groups try to influence the policymaker’s decision. Entry is accompanied by creative destruction—when many new firms enter, old firms are more likely to be driven out of the market. Therefore the current incumbents (industry leaders) te...

This paper proves a certainty equivalence result for optimal policy under commitment with symmetric partial information about the state of the economy in a model with forwardlooking variables. This result is used in our previous paper [9], which synthesizes what is known about the case of symmetric partial information, and derives useful general formulas for computation of the optimal policy re...

Using a standard open economy DSGE model, it is shown that the timing of asset trade relative to policy decisions has a potentially important impact on the welfare evaluation of monetary policy at the individual country level. If asset trade in the initial period takes place before the announcement of policy, a national policymaker can choose a policy rule which reduces the work effort of house...