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 ...

This article studies under which conditions interest rate rules “à la Taylor (1993)” lead to price determinacy. We scrutinize notably two famous results, which are standard in the traditional “Ricardian” model with a single dynasty of consumers: (1) a pure interest rate peg leads to nominal price indeterminacy; (2) a strong reaction (usually more than one for one) of nominal interest rates to i...

The paper presents a formal analysis which incorporates returns to transportation into a Ricardian framework to predict trade patterns. The important point to be gained from this analysis is that increasing returns to transportation, coupled with appropriate distances between trading partners can be shown to reverse Ricardian predictions even when there are no international differences in taste...

In recent years there has been a growing controversy concerning the effective role of distributional policy in economies in which agents hold altruistic preferences. We show that in order to establish cross sectional Distributional Neutrality households require information on consanguinity links prior to making their decisions on consumption and bequests. If such information is not available du...

This paper examines Ricardian equivalence in a world in which taxes are not lump sum, but are levied on risky labor income. It shows that the marginal propensity to consume out of a tax cut, coupled with a future income tax increase, can be substantial under plausible assumptions. Indeed, the MPC out of a tax cut can be closer to the Keynesian value that ignores the future tax liabilities than ...