THE NOTION OF TRANSPARENCY is broad-ranging. It encompasses notions of accountability and political legitimacy of decision makers, as well as the legal and accounting infrastructure in which economic decisions are made. But from the operational perspective of a central bank, transparency can be regarded more narrowly in terms of the disclosure of information to a wider audience. Intuitively, th...

The use of dynamic revenue forecasting to evaluate proposed tax law changes varies at the federal and state level. Congressional agencies take some behavioral effects into account, but they stop short of producing dynamic revenue estimates that may result from changes in fiscal policies. At the state level, 10 to 25 agencies use dynamic forecasting models in some circumstances. In general, the ...

This note presents data on Congressional fiscal policy by party and chamber, using the National Taxpayers Union annual vote index for 1979-2002. NTU scores are presented with and without adjusting for interchamber and intertemporal movements of the policy space over which the scores are calculated. Results indicate that the parties and chambers are much more stable over time, and exhibit a slig...

We study the role of anonymous markets in which trades cannot be monitored by the government. We adopt a Mirrlees approach to analyze economies in which agents have private information and a benevolent government controls optimal redistributive tax policy. While unrestricted access to anonymous markets reduces the set of policy instruments available to the government, it also limits the scope o...

Well before the global financial crisis, the stance of fiscal policy in a number of countries had raised concerns about risks for the outcomes of monetary policy. To provide some insights this paper examines the fiscal-monetary interactions in a novel game theory framework with asynchronous timing of moves. It generalizes the standard commitment concept of Stackelberg leadership by making it dy...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy rules in a fiscal federation, such as the European Union. The focus of the analysis is the interaction between the fiscal policy of member countries (regions) and the monetary authority. Each of the countries structures its fiscal policy (spending and taxes) with the interests of its citizens in mind. When capital markets are integrated, the fis...

We study discretionary non-cooperative monetary and fiscal policy stabilization in the New Keynesian model, where the fiscal authority uses distortionary taxes as policy instrument. We explicitly model different frequencies of fiscal and monetary policy operations. We find that standard models of monetary and fiscal policy interactions may substantially overestimate the social gain from the sta...

Motivated by empirical evidence suggesting a close link between weak institutional quality and informality, this paper proposes a game-theoretical model that explores how perceived governance effectiveness in public service provision determines a firm’s decision to be formal or informal under incomplete information with regard to other firms’ perceptions. By deploying a “global games” approach,...

In structuring this conference, the organizers have made the sensible decision to devote separate sessions to the problems of developing and developed countries. When attempting to confront unsustainable fiscal policies, developed economies are relieved of many of the economic constraints with which developing countries must deal. With greater wealth, more stable and credible governments, and m...

Using a flexible semiparametric varying coefficient model specification, this paper examines the role of fiscal policy on the U.S. asset markets (stocks, corporate and treasury bonds). We consider two possible roles of fiscal deficits (or surpluses): as a separate direct information variable and as a (indirect) conditioning information variable indicating binding constraints on monetary policy ...