The Time Consistency Of Optimal Monetary And Fiscal Policies

This is the first of two volumes on a theory of macroeconomic policy that analyzes which policies are credible or politically feasible. Instead of looking at policy as an end product, the contributors approach policy as an ongoing process of revised goals, changes in tactics, and political pressures. They consider what kinds of incentives within different institutional settings, drive policy-making and the behaviour of policy-makers. The approach explains why certain monetary and fiscal policies are implemented, and provides insights into situations that occur repeatedly in macroeconomic policy, such as the bias toward government deficits, partisan competition and central bank independence.

Over the past twenty five years, fiscal and monetary authorities around the world have pursued policies roughly consistent with the insights from optimal monetary and fiscal policy. In the area of monetary policy, the modern consensus is to set policy rules so that nominal interest rates and inflation are low. In the area of fiscal policy, statutory corporate income tax rates have decreased sharply in OECD countries on average over time. Typically, theoretical models in the literature usually examine either monetary or fiscal policies in isolation, but not both of them simultaneously. This book presents two alternative dynamic, general equilibrium models where the prescriptions from optimal monetary and fiscal policies are simultaneously examined. These models offer some new insights on the interaction of such policies, especially in terms of their effects on household s welfare. A third chapter examines optimal fiscal policy in the context of preference reversals. This book should be especially useful for policymakers in the area of macroeconomics and researchers working in the field.

The initial government debt-to-GDP ratio and the government’s commitment play a pivotal role in determining the welfare-optimal speed of fiscal consolidation in the management of a debt crisis. Under commitment, for low or moderate initial government debt-to-GPD ratios, the optimal consolidation is very slow. A faster pace is optimal when the economy starts from a high level of public debt implying high sovereign risk premia, unless these are suppressed via a bailout by official creditors. Under discretion, the cost of not being able to commit is reflected into a quick consolidation of government debt. Simple monetary-fiscal rules with passive fiscal policy, designed for an environment with “normal shocks”, perform reasonably well in mimicking the Ramsey-optimal response to one-off government debt shocks. When the government can issue also long-term bonds–under commitment–the optimal debt consolidation pace is slower than in the case of short-term bonds only, and entails an increase in the ratio between long and short-term bonds.

This book provides a thorough survey of the model-based literature on optimal monetary in a stochastic setting. The survey begins with the literature of the 1970s which focused on the information problem in policy design and extends to the New Keynesian approach of the 1990s which centered on evaluating alternative targeting strategies. New to the second edition is consideration of research since the world financial crisis on the role of financial markets and institutions in the conduct of monetary policy.

In this book, I characterize conditions under which optimal monetary and fiscal policy is time consistent in a stylized small open economy with a flexible foreign exchange rate regime. I show that these conditions depend on the way in which leisure is assumed to enter preferences and/or on the process which productivity is assumed to follow. I further argue that these conditions will fail to be sufficient if the small open economy implements a fixed foreign exchange rate regime. Thus, in a small open economy with conventional debt instruments and with households who have preference over consumption, leisure, and real money balances, it is impossible to have the following at the same time: perfect capital mobility, a credible fixed exchange rate, and time consistency of optimal fiscal policy. Finally, I discuss how to understand the long-term stability of monetary unions from the time-consistency perspective.