P rice-level stability is widely recognized as the principal goal of monetary policy (see, for example, Black 1990, Carlstrom and Gavin 1991, and Hoskins 1991). A program for price stability actually has two distinct objectives; achieving each objective has its own distinct benefits. The first objective is to reduce the expected rate of price inflation to zero. The second objective is to elimin...

OBJECTIVE To develop a simulation model to predict the effects of tax policies on smoking prevalence rates and smoking attributable deaths. METHODS Using data from Taiwan, a simulation model is developed that projects population using birth and death rate data, future smoking rates using initiation, cessation and relapse data, and smoking attributable deaths using smoking prevalence and relat...

We study the welfare cost of inflation in a general equilibrium life cycle model with growth, costly financial intermediation, and taxes on nominal quantities. We find a stationary equilibrium of the model matches a wide variety of facts about the postwar U.S. economy. We then calculate that the inflation policy of the monetary authority has welfare consequences for agents that are an order of ...

We explicitly consider strategic interaction between governments to study currency competition and its effects on the circulation of currencies and welfare in a two-country twocurrency search theoretic model. Each government finances public goods by means of seigniorage. Compared with a regime with two local currencies, a regime with one international currency allows the issuer of the internati...

Evidence on the portfolio holdings and transaction patterns of households suggests that the burden of inflation is not evenly distributed. We build a monetary growth model consistent with key features of cross-sectional household data and use this framework to study the distributional impact of inflation. At the aggregate level, our model economy behaves similar to standard monetary growth mode...

the aim of this study is to review the rentier state theory, with special regard to iran. iran’s rentier state is highly dependent on oil revenues, but much less on tax revenues. even this negligible reliance on tax revenues, itself seems to be indebted to oil revenues. thus the main research hypothesis is that iran’s oil revenue is one of the main determinants of tax revenues. to empirically t...

The paper examines government spending that is financed by taxes that distort output and by the inflation tax. High inflation and low output are the consequence of fiscal ambitions that exceed the current capacity of the economy to support. Supply-side growth alleviates this tension, allowing lower inflation, lower tax distortions, and higher output. In the presence of commitment problems, reso...

Recent years have witnessed very high and volatile interest rates. This has stirred a debate among analysts as to whether observed interest rates are high by historical standards. Some analysts, focusing on the before-tax real rate, argue that if the observed nominal interest rate is corrected for the effect of expected (or actual) inflation, the ex ante (or ex post) real rate has been very hig...

A problematic feature of the existing empirical literature on the relationship between revenue decentralization (RD) and inflation is the use of inaccurate measures for RD. Using a newly constructed measure for RD that accounts for over-time changes in subnational tax autonomy, this paper finds that RD leads to lower inflation.

This dissertation consists of three essays which investigate the economic implications of monetary and fiscal policies on the macroeconomy. The first essay focuses on the following question: how can we explain the observed behavior of aggregate inflation in response to e.g. monetary policy changes? Mankiw and Reis (2002) have proposed sticky information as an alternative to Calvo sticky prices ...