This note presents a stylized model of monetary and fiscal policies in which policy regime evolves randomly according to a Markov chain. This simple model is designed to illustrate that well-defined and unique equilibria can exist even in such an environment. It also shows that under certain assumptions about policy behavior, tax disturbances can generate wealth effects in line with the fiscal ...

The Ricardian model predicts that countries should produce and export relatively more in industries in which they are relatively more productive. Though one of the most celebrated insights in the theory of international trade, this prediction has received little attention in the empirical literature since the mid-1960s. The main reason behind this lack of popularity is the absence of clear theo...

Technological change has led to a dramatic decline in the cost of communication and in the cost of coordinating activities performed in different locations. This has allowed firms in rich countries to fragment their production process and offshore an increasing share of the value chain to low-wage countries. 2 Richard Baldwin (2006) refers to this phenomenon as the “second unbundling.” In his w...

This paper uses a Ricardian model of trade to study the growth of international trade from 1884 to 1992. The Dornbusch, Fischer, Samuelson (1977) Ricardian model with a continuum of goods is used following Evenett and Yeung’s (2000) derivation of a relationship between the trade flows and trade impediments. A key supply side parameter is estimated using weighted least squares and correcting for...

Robert Barro (1974) showed government debt has no real effects when generations are linked by altruistically motivated intergenerational transfers, a result now known widely as the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem. An important condition for debt neutrality is believed to be the absence of strategic interactions between members of different generations. I use a simple two-period, parent and child ...

Maintaining price stability requires not only commitment to an appropriate monetary policy rule, but an appropriate fiscal policy rule as well. Ricardian equivalence does not imply that fiscal policy is irrelevant, except in the case of a certain class of policies (“Ricardian” policies). The role of fiscal developments in inflation determination under a non-Ricardian regime is illustrated throu...