Under EMU,monetary policy is oriented towards union-wide economic conditions, and cannot effectively address country-specific macroeconomic disturbances. Should national fiscal policy be used more actively, for stabilizing individual economies, now that exchange rate changes among member countries are no longer possible? Several recent studies answer this important normative question, based on ...

Worldwide monetary and fiscal policies in the past few years have put into sharp relief the fundamental tradeoff between short-run stabilization and long-run sustainability that policymakers face. The paper is organized around this question: How do the effects of routine monetary and fiscal operations designed to achieve macroeconomic stabilization objectives change when the economy moves from ...

We study the monetary instrument problem in a model of optimal discretionary fiscal and monetary policy. The policy problem is cast as a dynamic game between the central bank, the fiscal authority, and the private sector. We show that, as long as there is a conflict of interest between the two policy-makers, the central bank’s monetary instrument choice critically affects the Markov-perfect Nas...

This paper investigate the stabilization bias that arises in a model of non-cooperative monetary and fiscal policy stabilisation of the economy, when monetary authority implements price level targeting but fiscal policy remains benevolent. We demonstrate the gain in welfare improvement depends on the level of steady state debt. If the steady state level of the government debt is low, then the m...

In the United States, eradication of persistent federal deficits has won broad bipartisan support. At the same time, political pressures have mounted to strengthen the Federal Reserve's explicit concern with price stability. Proposals under consideration would require a much narrower focus on the part of Fed policymakers, and could be interpreted as targeting the price level rather than a negli...

This paper investigates the efficiency of monetary and fiscal policy in a twocountry general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition and wage stickiness. When monopoly distortions are completely eliminated, we find that under some conditions, stochastic government spending can affect the efficiency of global monetary policy rules that replicate the real allocations under flexible wages....