inflation and financial deepening abstract financial deepening is defined as increases in the ratio of a country s financial assets to its gdp financial asset accumulation simultaneously provides credit to finance real asset accumulation for the development process the equilibrium long run ratio of financial assets to gdp may be expressed as a simple relationship of a country s financial savings ratio and its growth rate the present paper incorporates the effects of inflation on financial deepening inflation necessarily entails capital losses on all existing financial asset holdings it is shown that unless more monetary saving is forthcoming to offset such inflation induced capital losses inflation will operate to reduce drastically the degree of financial deepening which a country can obtain the process is illustrated with respect to the korean economy

optimal taxation with endogenously incomplete debt markets abstract empirical analyses of labor tax and public debt processes provide prima facie evidence for imperfect government insurance this paper considers a model in which the government s inability to commit to future policies or to report truthfully its spending needs renders government debt markets endogenously incomplete a method for solving for optimal fiscal policy under these constraints is developed such policy is found to be intermediate between that implied by the complete insurance ramsey model and a model with exogenously incomplete debt markets in contrast to optimal ramsey policy optimal policy in this model is consistent with a variety of stylized fiscal policy facts such as the high persistence of labor tax rates and debt levels and the positive covariance between government spending and the value of government debt sales

speculation under unawareness no trade theorems establish that in various trading environments investors who share a common prior will not engage in speculation as long as expected utility bayesian updating and full awareness are imposed we relax the last assumption by allowing for asymmetric unawareness and examine under which conditions speculative behaviour emerges we find that if common knowledge is assumed as in the settings of aumann 1976 and milgrom and stokey 1982 unawareness cannot generate speculation this is not true however in settings where no common knowledge is assumed such as speculation in equilibrium geanakoplos 1989 and betting that is always beneficial morris 1994 unless stronger conditions on awareness are imposed

inflation and reputation in many macroeconomic models with rational expectations optimal policy is time inconsistent and therefore announced policy may not be credible this paper models the government s credibility explicitly using kreps and wilson s analysis time consistent optimal government policy emerges as a sequential equilibrium in a repeated game this policy is at least as good as the inconsistent optimal policy and dominates the consistent policy when reputational effects are ignored thus the analysis resolves the problem of specifying a credible optimal policy in such models the results show why attempts to disinflate may lead to recession even with perfectly flexible prices this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

sustainable monetary policies abstract this paper uses a model with utility maximizing households monopolistically competitive firms and sticky goods prices to derive a version of barro and gordon s time consistency problem for monetary policy where the government s objectives are consistent with a representative household s preferences the paper applies the methods of chari and kehoe to characterize the entire set of time consistent or sustainable outcomes it goes on to find conditions under which the friedman rule the optimal policy under commitment can be supported when the government lacks a commitment technology

financial intermediation and endogenous growth an endogenous growth model with multiple assets is developed agents who face random future liquidity needs accumulate capital and a liquid but unproductive asset the effects of introducing financial intermediation into this environment are considered conditions are provided under which the introduction of intermediaries shifts the composition of savings toward capital causing intermediation to be growth promoting in addition intermediaries generally reduce socially unnecessary capital liquidation again tending to promote growth

debt restructuring with a public good endogenous government expenditure is introduced into lucas and stokey s 1983 model of optimal wage taxation so long as the government can precommit to taxes or to expenditures a debt maturity structure that keeps the value of the debt invariant to interest rate changes will make the optimal policies time consistent in the absence of partial precommitment debt restructuring cannot enforce time consistency but it can still limit the costs of time inconsistency numerical examples show 1 average debt is smaller than under the precommitment solution 2 the debt structure is much longer than under partial precommitment and 3 restricting the government to one period debt overstates the welfare losses from time inconsistency

the theory of sovering debt and spain under philip ii this paper examines lending by a genoese led cartel to philip ii of spain 1556 98 from the perspective of theory on sovereign debt models in this literature suggest that the genoese linked specie deliveries from spain to the low countries to lending in order to create a penalty to enforce their loans the king tried to renege the genoese applied the penalty and the king ultimately repaid when the episode is used to examine theory the crown s observed debt ceiling and estimates of its cost of enduring the penalty and its ability to repay are in line with predctions of bulow and rogoff the nature of the penalty has the flavor of gole and kehoe s model its observation on the path of play is suggestive of atkeson s model

usury laws and consumer credit a note much has been written on the potential effects of rate ceilings on consumer credit markets 1 and numerous empirical studies have analyzed the impact of rate ceilings on mortgage loans and housing construction markets 2 however the actual effect of loan rate ceilings on consumer financial markets in general has not been well documented in part because credit terms are complex so the credit offer function has several arguments notwithstanding the potential complexity of credit terms it is usually assumed that if a rate ceiling reduces the nominal price of credit p the market will fail to clear and excess credit demand will need to be rationed out of the market by adjusting credit terms other than the rate in this context most investigators assume first that the price of credit is solely a function of the interest rate r and second that required credit rationing is conducted by suppliers who reject risky customers or alter credit terms to reduce risk when credit obtained at the retail point of sale is considered however more options are available in particular the price of goods purchased with credit can be raised 3 thus a more general model of consumer credit would note that p p r pr where pr the price premium on goods purchased with credit since funds are highly fungible it is likely that consumers are able to substitute retail originated credit for other sources of consumer credit at low cost if portfolio adjustment costs were zero a rate ceiling could have no effect on consumer s total indebtedness as any decrease in r could be exactly offset by an increase in pr at retail credit sources so that p would remain unchanged however it is unlikely that all consumer credit needs can be met by obtaining retail credit so that consumer use of credit may be reduced by rate ceilings this would occur if consumers bore adjustment costs such as transportation costs when they switched from cash to retail credit sources that suppliers did not receive the question then arises whether when retail credit is available adjust

sovereign debt and consumption smoothing abstract this paper shows that whether or not a sovereign can borrow to smooth consumption depends both on how consumption smoothing is achieved whether by contingent debt issuance or by contingent debt servicing and on the penalty for debt repudiation if a sovereign that repudiated its debt could not borrow again but could continue to save and to dissave then contingent debt issuance without contingent debt servicing cannot support a positive amount of uncollateralized sovereign debt but with this same penalty for repudiation contingent debt servicing supports a positive amount of uncollateralized sovereign debt

time consistent collection of optimal seigniorage a unifying framework this paper reviews the existing literature on the time consistency problem of seigniorage collection when monetary policy is determined by optimal taxation considerations it develops a unifying accounting framework and suggests a general measure for seigniorage which encompasses the standard measures employed in the literature in addition the ex ante optimal solution to the optimal taxation problem is derived and interpreted in relation to the ramsey principle we show that the different recommendations of the public finance literature i e the friedman rule of optimal deflation moderately positive inflation and seigniorage maximizing inflation are specific solutions to the optimal taxation problem the paper continues with a formal illustration of the time consistency problem of the ex ante optimal policy and the characterization of the time consistent solution under discretion as possible solutions to the time consistency problem we consider reputational forces institutional reforms that establish central bank independence and specific ways of asset and debt management in particular it is formally shown that a modified version of the asset and debt management scheme suggested by persson persson and svensson is not only necessary but also sufficient for optimality although this did not hold in their model

bubbles and self enforcing debt we characterize equilibria with endogenous debt constraints for a general equilibrium economy with limited commitment in which the only consequence of default is losing the ability to borrow in future periods first we show that equilibrium debt limits must satisfy a simple condition that allows agents to exactly roll over existing debt period by period second we provide an equivalence result whereby the resulting set of equilibrium allocations with self enforcing private debt is equivalent to the allocations that are sustained with unbacked public debt or rational bubbles in contrast to the classic result by bulow and rogoff 1989a positive levels of debt are sustainable in our environment because the interest rate is sufficiently low to provide repayment incentives

discretionary monetary and fiscal policy with endogenous sovereign risk abstract how does the presence of sovereign risk affect the conduct of public policy to answer this question this paper studies optimal monetary and fiscal policy without commitment for a model economy with nominal public debt and strategic sovereign default compared to an economy without the possibility of default economies with sovereign risk experience more volatile interest rates which impedes the government s ability to smooth tax rates across states risk of default also limits public debt accumulation reducing the government s incentive to use surprise inflation on average when calibrated to the united states the model predicts that a counterfactual increase in the average annual default probability from 0 to 1 lowers average inflation by 33 raises the standard deviation of inflation by 18 and increases the standard deviation of the labor income tax by 73 the transmission of exogenous shocks to real aggregate quantities is however almost unaffected by the possibility of default for example the presence of sovereign risk would increase the standard deviation of log real gdp by less than 1 in the experiment above similarly the welfare consequences of sovereign risk are found to be of negligible size as well

politico economic equilibrium and economic growth abstract we propose a notion of dynamic politico economic equilibrium which builds on two key assumptions policies are determined sequentially and agents are fully rational in their roles as both consumers and voters we examine a simple model of endogenous growth and infinitely lived agents where taxes on income are endogenous and where growth critically depends on the initial distribution of asset holdings we relate our equilibrium definition and results to existing literature on time consistency and on political economy and growth we show that our equilibria are time consistent and we argue that the choice of equilibrium concept might have important quantitative implications

future rent seeking and current public savings abstract the conventional wisdom is that politicians rent seeking motives increase public debt and deficits this is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible in this paper we study the determination of government debt and deficits in a dynamic political economy model we show that this conventional wisdom relies on economic volatility being low relative to political uncertainty if economic volatility is high relative to political uncertainty then a rent seeking government actually over saves and over taxes along the equilibrium path relative to a benevolent government this result emerges because of the option value of rent seeking a rent seeking government over values future funds because of the possibility of using them for future rents instead of cutting taxes in the event of a future boom when marginal utility of private consumption is low this over saving bias is temporary since in the long run the rent seeking government over borrows relative to the benevolent government as it eventually squanders the funds it has accumulated we find that both the under saving and over saving bias of the government can be solved by a rule of capping deficits

optimal financial structure of finance companies in a regulated environment of a developing country little is known about the regulatory framework for financial institutions in developing countries in this paper the effect of regulations in the financial structure of finance companies in a developing country is examined the analysis suggests that regulations are so restrictive that they are reducing competition limiting the mobilization of local resources and inducing credit rationing in the financial system the application of simple programming techniques to evaluate the regulatory framework is also demonstrated some policy recommendations and suggestions for further research are presented at the end

trade with heterogeneous prior beliefs and asymmetric information no trade theorems have shown that new information will not lead to trade when agents share the same prior beliefs this paper explores the structure of no trade theorems with heterogeneous prior beliefs it is shown how different notions of efficiency under asymmetric information ex ante interim ex post are related to agents prior beliefs as well as incentive compatible and public versions of those efficiency concepts these efficiency results are used to characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on agents beliefs for no trade theorems in different trading environments

optimal capital taxation revisited abstract we revisit the question of how capital should be taxed we allow for a rich set of tax instruments that consists of taxes widely used in practice including consumption dividend capital and labor income taxes we restrict policies to those that respect pre existing promises regarding the current value of wealth we show that capital should not be taxed i e there should be no intertemporal distortions if households have preferences that are standard in the macroeconomics literature we show that ramsey outcomes that must respect such promises are time consistent we show that the presumption in the literature that capital should be taxed for some length of time arises because the tax system is restricted

repeated games with long run and short run players this paper studies the set of equilibrium payoffs in repeated games with long and short run players and little discounting because the short run players are unconcerned about the future each equilibrium outcome is constrained to lie on their static reaction best response curves the natural extension of the folk theorem to games of this sort would simply include this constraint in the definitions of the feasible payoffs and minmax values in fact this extension does obtain under the assumption that each player s choice of a mixed strategy for the stage game is publicly observable but in contrast to standard repeated games the set of equilibrium payoffs is different if players can observe only their opponents realized actions

reputation and time consistency recent work has shown that reputational arguments based on trigger strategies can sometimes be used to deal with the problem of time inconsistency in government policy this idea was exploited by robert barro and david gordon 1983 in a model of inflation and by v v chari and patrick kehoe 1988 in a model of capital taxation here it is shown that reputational arguments of this sort are widely applicable 2 a general policy model is developed based on an economy that is stationary over time contains identical households and has no endogenous state variables it is shown in general that the infinite horizon version of this model has equilibria in trigger strategies that yield outcomes strictly better than those attainable as equilibria in the one period model

inflation and financial deepening comment abstract in a recent paper moore 1986 has criticized mckinnon s 1976 analysis of the relationship between a country s savings propensities and its money income ratio on both logical and empirical grounds and has proposed an alternative treatment we argue here that moore s critique and proposed alternative while containing useful insights are theoretically and empirically problematic and we propose a synthesis of mckinnon s and moore s treatments we also develop a simple growth model based upon our synthesis which is shown to generate certain significant implications for the neo structuralist critique of the mckinnon shaw financial liberalization prescription

unorganized money markets and unproductive assets in the new structuralist critique of financial liberalization abstract the new structuralists critique of financial liberalization emphasizes the role of informal credit markets in financing firms residual credit demand in ldcs and the relevance of households portfolio substitution patterns the sensitivity of their policy conclusions is demonstrated in the context of a representative model developed by van wijnbergen the relative efficiency of intermediation in the formal and informal credit markets crucially affects the outcome of the portfolio allocation effects generated by higher bank deposit rates an anomaly in the characterization of unproductive assets in defining credit supply is also examined

the new structuralist critique of the monetarist theory of inflation the case of the philippines abstract developing economies may be characterized by long production lags advanced outlays to finance working capital needs will therefore assume primary importance with weak commodity and equity markets the financing is usually funded by credit either from the legal banking sector or from an underground curb market monetary and credit contraction espoused by monetarists as a key policy for controlling inflation will increase the cost of financing working capital needs this has an immediate short run stagflationary impact coming from the supply side of the economy the study uses a one sector macro model to test this hypothesis on the philippines with annual data from 1958 to 1980 the results give empirical support to the claim that the working capital cost push supply side effect is strong enough which means that austerity measures may require a heavy and costly recession before price inflation can be brought down

public sector banking efficiency and economic growth in india abstract this paper develops a framework that integrates harrod domar growth model and mckinnon shaw hypothesis via molho s dynamic adjustment mechanism the model is used to determine the impact of bank nationalization through aggressive bank branch expansion programs and priority sector credit allocation on india s financial savings investment productivity and gdp the empirical findings indicate that the bank nationalization policy has been a mixed blessing the aggressive bank branch program since 1969 resulted in an increased in savings investment productivity of capital and gdp however the priority sector credit allocation policy did not fully achieve its desired goals

politicians taxes and debt the standard analysis of the efficient management of income taxes and debt assumes a benevolent government and ignores potential distortions arising from rent seeking politicians this paper departs from this framework by assuming that a rent seeking politician chooses policies if the politician chooses extractive policies citizens throw him out of power we analyse the efficient sustainable equilibrium unlike in the standard economy temporary economic shocks generate volatile and persistent changes in taxes along the equilibrium path this serves to optimally limit rent seeking by the politician and to optimally generate support for the politician from the citizens taxes resembling those of the benevolent government are very costly since the government over saves and resources are wasted on rents political distortions thus cause the complete debt market to behave as if it were incomplete however in contrast to an incomplete market economy in the long run taxes do not converge to zero and under some conditions they resemble taxes under a benevolent government

optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital abstract this paper is concerned with the structure and time consistency of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital in a dynamic context optimal taxation means distributing tax distortions over time in a welfare maximizing way for a barter economy our main finding is that with debt commitments of sufficiently rich maturity structure an optimal policy if one exists is time consistent in a monetary economy the idea of optimal taxation must be broadened to include an inflation tax and we find that time consistency does not carry over an optimal inflation tax requires commitment by rules in a sense that has no counterpart in the dynamic theory of ordinary excise taxes the reason time consistency fails in a monetary economy is that nominal assets should from a welfare maximizing point of view always be taxed away via an immediate inflation in a kind of capital levy this emerges as a new possibility when money is introduced into an economy without capital

nominal sovereign debt i show that reputation alone can sustain nominal sovereign debt which is subject to both the risks of default and opportunistic devaluations nominal debt combined with a countercyclical exchange rate policy allows more hedging against shocks than real savings if markets are incomplete thus the loss of either repayment or monetary reputation severely affects the government s ability to smooth consumption the model offers a simple explanation for the bulow and rogoff critique while simultaneously helping explain the issuance of nominal sovereign bonds by emerging economies the model also helps explain why many governments borrow and save at the same time

shrouded attributes consumer myopia and information suppression in competitive markets bayesian consumers infer that hidden add on prices e g the cost of ink for a printer are likely to be high prices if consumers are bayesian firms will not shroud information in equilibrium however shrouding may occur in an economy with some myopic or unaware consumers such shrouding creates an inefficiency which firms may have an incentive to eliminate by educating their competitors customers however if add ons have close substitutes a curse of debiasing arises and firms will not be able to profitably debias consumers by unshrouding add ons in equilibrium two kinds of exploitation coexist optimizing firms exploit myopic consumers through marketing schemes that shroud high priced add ons in turn sophisticated consumers exploit these marketing schemes it is not possible to profitably drive away the business of sophisticates it is also not possible to profitably lure either myopes or sophisticates to nonexploitative firms we show that informational shrouding flourishes even in highly competitive markets even in markets with costless advertising and even when the shrouding generates allocational inefficiencies

monetization economic development and the exogeneity of money abstract using granger causality the authors examine the question of the exogeniety of money in india during its period of most rapid monetization 1970 1975 the paper finds that the demand for money function with the narrow stock of money can be estimated but not with the broad stock of money there is evidence of feedback between m 2 monetized income and the rate of interest an explanation along the lines of patrick s analysis of supply led financial development is advanced to show the influence of m 2 on income and the rate of interest

the time consistency of optimal monetary and fiscal policies we show that optimal monetary and fiscal policies are time consistent for a class of economies often used in applied work economies appealing because they are consistent with the growth facts we establish our results in two steps we first show that for this class of economies the friedman rule of setting nominal interest rates to zero is optimal under commitment we then show that optimal policies are time consistent if the friedman rule is optimal for our benchmark economy in which the time consistency problem is most severe the converse also holds if optimal policies are time consistent then the friedman rule is optimal

financial repression the new structuralists and stabilization policy in semi industrialized economies abstract this paper examines the short and long run effects of a variety of macroeconomic policies in a simple model where the curb market plays a pivotal role as the marginal supplier of loanable funds it is found that financial liberalization may fail in the short run and contrary to the claims of the new structuralists that the financial market repercussions of devaluation may be favorable in evaluating any policy the time horizon is critical short and long run multipliers may differ in sign in all cases save that of a contraction in the stock of bank credit

the valuation effects of the 1977 community reinvestment act and its enforcement abstract we examine the wealth effects of the passage of the community reinvestment act cra of 1977 for commercial banks and savings and loan associations we find significantly negative average excess returns for small nyse amex banks and sl in contrast there is no evidence that large nyse amex institutions or nasdaq institutions experience wealth losses we also study the effects of individual cra protests against institutions and find they produce significantly negative excess returns which are not reversed when the protests are resolved our results have implications for proposed changes to cra and for the future consolidation of the financial services industry the results also demonstrate the difficulties associated with studying returns from the early years of the nasdaq market

public debt and optimal taxes without commitment abstract benhabib and rustichini optimal taxes without commitment j econ theory 77 1997 231 259 study the properties of optimal capital taxes in economies without commitment and no government debt they find that capital taxes may be different from zero at steady state this note shows that once governments have the possibility of issuing debt and smoothing taxes over time optimal steady state capital taxes turn out to be zero

time consistency of fiscal and monetary policy the problem of time inconsistency arises from two different sources first as shown by guillermo a calvo 1978 the re is an incentive for each government to engage in an initial unanti cipated inflation second as discussed by robert e lucas and nancy l stokey 1983 there is an incentive for each government to deviat e from the path of taxes announced by the preceding government in th is paper it is shown that these two sources of time inconsistency ca n be removed by a particular method of debt management involving bot h nominal and indexed government bonds of various maturities copyright 1987 by the econometric society

income velocity of money in agricultural developing economies t he response of income velocity of money to economic growth has implications for monetary planning in a developing economy velocity is the ratio of nominal income to money stock and decreases only if money stock rises at a faster rate than nominal income a well known hypothesis in this context is that of friedman 1959 which states that in countries experiencing a secular rise in real income per capita the stock of money generally rises over long periods at a decidedly higher rate than does money income i e velocity declines ezekiel and adekunle 1969 and melitz and correa 1970 in their international crosscountry comparisons have found evidence largely in favour of the friedman hypothesis this in its turn has strengthened the hope for active growthoriented monetary planning the extent of resources that can be transferred for investment purposes through non inflationary monetary expansion increases as development proceeds cross section studies involving developed and developing economies do not provide satisfactory indications of what happens to velocity over time in any individual developing economy firstly velocities have not behaved uniformly in all the developing economies secondly international cross country comparisons do not adequately explain why velocity changes in any individual economy is it because money is a luxury good i e income elasticity of demand for money is greater than unity to the agents in the economy is it because economic development brings about structural changes in the economy which lead to the observed behaviour of velocity is it because monetary habits change in a systematic way it is important to have time series analyses of developing economies to provide answers to such questions for example in a study of malaysia and singapore short 1973 found that though velocity did move inversely to per capita income this negative impact was overpowered by the change in monetary habits which the increase in bank offices caused the aim of this paper is to analyse the temporal behaviour of income velocity of money in agricultural developing economies in the literature on velocity and demand for money in developing economies attention is focussed mainly on three issues i the incomeelasticity of demand for money and in particular whether money is a luxury good or not ii the growth of monetisation and changes in monetary habits and iii the effect of the cost of holding money one important factor which has suffered total neglect is the role of sectoral differences in money demand behaviour and the structural shifts in the sectoral composition of income that accompany development money demand behaviour may vary across sectors this is true not only in developing economies but also in developed economies for example goldfeld 1976 has found that the business sector and the household sector in the united states have different money demand functions an implicit specification error is committed in the aggregative money demand or velocity equation whenever the sectoral income composition factor is omitted on a priori grounds this factor should have special significance in developing economies where sectoral shares in national income change over time in the absence of flow offunds accounts and adequate data on sectoral money holdings for most of the developing economies direct estimation of sectoral demand functions is not possible thus an aggregative specification which incorporates the sectoral income composition factor is necessary to analyse the behaviour of velocity

on the duality between prior beliefs and trading demands in an abstract model with asymmetric information we show that there is a duality relationship between the prior beliefs and trading demands of bets for any given individual then we aggregate all the agents to obtain a second duality relationship between common prior beliefs and trading possibilities we easily derive from these relationships the no trade theorem and its converse general efficiency results can be obtained moreover our framework is sufficiently general to cover special cases proved previously for example econometrica 62 1994 1327 discussion paper 83 center for rationality and interactive decision theory the hebrew university of jerusalem 1995 j econom theory 91 2000 127 gameseconom behav 24 1998 172 yet our argumentsare both simple and intuitive r 2003 published by elsevier science usa

optimal time consistent government debt maturity this paper develops a model of optimal debt maturity in which the government cannot issue statecontingent debt as the literature has established if the government can perfectly commit to fiscal policy it fully insulates the economy against government spending shocks by purchasing short term assets and issuing long term debt these positions are quantitatively very large relative to gdp and do not need to be actively managed by the government our main result is that these conclusions are not robust when lack of commitment is introduced under lack of commitment large and tilted debt positions are very expensive to finance ex ante since they ex post exacerbate the government s problem stemming from a lack of commitment in contrast a flat maturity structure minimizes the cost entailed by a lack of commitment though this structure also limits the ability to insure against shocks and increases the volatility of fiscal policy distortions we show that the optimal time consistent maturity structure is nearly flat because reducing average borrowing costs is quantitatively more important for welfare than reducing fiscal policy volatility thus under lack of commitment the government actively manages its debt positions and can approximate optimal policy by confining its debt instruments to consols

investment spending and interest rate policy the case of financial liberalisation in turkey the purpose of the present study is to analyse the impact of interest rate policy on investment spending in turkey over a period which covers years of both financial repression and financial liberalisation the model presented suggests that investment will be positively correlated with below equilibrium interest rates and negatively correlated with above equilibrium rates the model is tested using a switching regime model with an unknown equilibrium rate of interest the results suggest that setting interest rates too high may be as detrimental to economic health as setting them too low moreover there is evidence of an autonomous downward shift in the investment function during the liberalisation period which may have resulted from heightened uncertainty during the period

the possibility of speculative trade between dynamically consistent agents it is shown that interim dynamically consistent trade may be supported among agents who have resolute non consequential choice preferences

sovereign default and the sustainability risk premium effect abstract we analyze the joint determination of interest rate risk and debt sustainability for governments with fiscal imbalances because higher interest rates imply increased debt services they worsen the government s financial situation and increase the probability of sovereign default thus higher interest rates eventually lead to a decrease in the real demand for government bonds which imposes an additional constraint on government debt sustainability

cognition and incomplete contracts thinking about contingencies designing covenants and seeing through their implications is costly parties to a contract accordingly use heuristics and leave it incomplete the paper develops a model of limited cognition and examines its consequences for contractual design

food and work poverty and hunger nutrition and human productivity many have suggested that widespread undernutrition is a major factor retarding work output and development this hypothesis has been expounded with particular vigor by the international development agencies the world bank presently estimates that 34 of the population in developing countries have insufficient energy intakes to allow them to lead an active working life h correa and g cummins p belli and b m popkin have developed well thought out expositions of the above cycle of poverty theory 2 although some developmentalists led by p v sukhatme t srinivasan p payne and m lipton3 have been questioning these assumptions with increasing vigor the cycle of poverty is a deceptively logical and extremely tenacious example of the persistence of error in speculations concerning development statements such as physical weakness interacts with other disadvantages to perpetuate poverty acute shortage of food impairs development poor people are locked into a syndrome of physical deprivation 4 and low real income is a reflection of low productivity the case for balanced growth rests on the need for a balanced diet are still common in the literature in his 1982 edition of the widely read and well written exposition of major developmental issues entitled inside the third world paul harrison states the labour of a hungry man is less productiveso he is likely to produce less or to earn less and this will keep him poor and hungry food intake has a direct and obvious effect on work avoidance of physical effort and excessive resting become essential adaptations to chronic hunger with low income he can afford to buy less food and is caught in a vicious circle of poverty malnutrition

a theory of political and economic cycles abstract we develop a theoretical framework in which political and economic cycles are jointly determined these cycles are driven by three political economy frictions policymakers are non benevolent they cannot commit to policies and they have private information about the tightness of the government budget and rents our first main result is that in the most favorable equilibrium to the households distortions to production emerge and never disappear even in the long run this result is driven by the interaction of limited commitment and private information on the side of the policymaker since in the absence of either friction there are no long run distortions to production our second result is that if the variance of private information is sufficiently large there is equilibrium turnover in the long run so that political cycles never disappear finally our model produces a long run distribution of taxes distortions and turnover where these all respond persistently to temporary economic shocks

inefficiencies from financial liberalization in the absence of well functioning equity markets since the seminal works by mckinnon 1973 and shaw 1973 there has been active research into the working of financially repressed economies and the beneficial effects of elnancial liberalization see fry 1982 for a survey of literature they claim that liberalization of the elnancial sector from interest rate ceilings and other restrictions facilitates economic development and growth because higher interest rates lead to both increased savings and greater efficiency of capital allocation today the idea that financial activity should not be repressed has become the new orthodoxy in academia as well as in the major international institutions that provide policy guidelines for developing countries the elnancial liberalization argument however is incomplete the literature on emancial liberalization has emphasized eliminating interest rate ceilings and fostering free competition among banks it has largely overlooked the possibility that endogenous constraints in the credit market such as imperfect information could be signielcant barriers to efelcient credit allocation even when banks are freed from interest rate ceilings nor has the literature dealt with market structure e g the oligopolistic and cartelized banking systems found in most locs the literature has emphasized the role of the banking sector which is correctly perceived as the only organized capital market in most developing countries it has neglected the potential

sequential equilibria in a ramsey tax model this paper presents a full characterization of the equilibrium value set of a ramsey tax model more generally it develops a dynamic programming method for a class of policy games between the government and a continuum of households by selectively incorporating euler conditions into a strategic dynamic programming framework we wed two technologies that are usually considered competing alternatives resulting in a substantial simplification of the problem

reputation and equilibrium selection in games with a patient player a single long run player plays a simultaneous move stage game against a sequence of opponents who play only once but observe all previous play let the stackelberg strategy be the pure strategy to which the long run player would most like to commit himself if there is positive prior probability that the long run player will always play the stackelberg strategy then his payoff in any nash equilibrium exceeds a bound that converges to the stackelberg payoff as his discount factor approaches one when the stage game is not simultaneous move this result must be modified to account for the possibility that distinct strategies of the long run player are observationally equivalent

subjective beliefs and ex ante trade we study a definition of subjective beliefs applicable to preferences that allow for the perception of ambiguity and provide a characterization of such beliefs in terms of market behavior using this definition we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the efficiency of ex ante trade and show that these conditions follow from the fundamental welfare theorems when aggregate uncertainty is absent our results show that full insurance is efficient if and only if agents share some common subjective beliefs our results hold for a general class of convex preferences which contains many functional forms used in applications involving ambiguity and ambiguity aversion we show how our results can be articulated in the language of these functional forms confirming results existing in the literature generating new results and providing a useful tool for applications

limits of markets and limits of governments an introduction to a symposium on political economy abstract this introduces the journal of economic theory symposium on political economy journal of economic literature classification number p16

sustainable plans and debt abstract this paper presents a simple general equilibrium model of optimal fiscal policy similar to that of lucas and stokey j monet econ 12 1983 55 93 except that we let the government default on its debt we consider sustainable equilibria in which both government and private agent decision rules are required to be sequentially rational we concentrate on trigger mechanisms which specify reversion to the markov equilibrium after deviations by the government and show that such mechanisms cannot support equilibria with positive debt we go on to show by way of examples that there can be more complicated trigger mechanisms which support positive debt journal of economic literature classification numbers e61 e62

monetization financial liberalization and economic development barter sector in 1954 55 the monetized sector contributed 69 to the net national product of india the share of the monetized sector increased to 78 6 of the net national product by 1974 75 during this period the explicit objective of monetary policy in india was to help accelerate the pace of economic development in an environment of reasonable price stability there are several versions of the financial liberalization hypothesis but the one put forward by ronald mckinnon is chosen here because of its succinctness and easy amenability to empirical verification 2 mckinnon s theory in essence deals with the effect of financial liberalization on the accumulation of capital through a policy of high real interest rates this formulation has been made operational by estimating the response of real demand for money balances and private investment to alternative rates of return under the implicit assumption that these are the only two alternative forms of assets held by the private sector 3 all this is predicated on the assumption that the effective limitation on the rate of real capital formation is the supply of real savings and not the inadequate willingness to invest most underdeveloped countries have a significant barter sector a reduction in the share of the barter sector can help to further accelerate the accumulation of capital in a barter system a good share of the factors of production is tied up in distribution away from production to achieve the double coincidence required in such a system with the

international lending with moral hazard and risk of repudiation in this paper i examine the constrained optimal pattern of capital flows between a lender and a borrower in an environment in which there are two impediments to forming contracts the first impediment to contracting arises from the assumption that lenders cannot observe whether borrowers invest or consume borrowed funds this assumption leads to a moral hazard problem in investment the second impediment arises from the assumption that the borrower as a sovereign nation may choose to repudiate his debts the optimal contract is shown to specify that the borrowing country experience a capital outflow when the worst realizations of national output occur this seemingly perverse capital outflow forms a necessary part of the optimal solution to the moral hazard problem in investment

debts and deficits with fragmented fiscal policymaking abstract this paper develops a political economic model of fiscal policy one in which government resources are a common property out of which interest groups can finance expenditures on their preferred items this setup has striking macroeconomic implications transfers are higher than a benevolent planner would choose them to be fiscal deficits emerge even when there are no reasons for intertemporal smoothing and in the long run government debt tends to be excessively high peculiar time profiles for transfers can emerge with high net transfers early on giving rise to high taxes later on

regulating exclusion from financial markets we study optimal enforcement in credit markets in which the only threat facing a defaulting borrower is restricted access to financial markets we solve for the optimal level of exclusion and link it to observed institutional arrangements regulation in this environment must accomplish two objectives first it must prevent borrowers from defaulting on one bank and transferring their resources to another bank second and less obviously it must give banks the incentive to make sizeable loans and to honor their promises of future credit we establish that the optimal regulation resembles observed laws governing default on debt moreover if debtors have the right to a fresh start after bankruptcy then this must be balanced by enforceable provisions against fraudulent conveyance our optimal regulation is robust in that it can be implemented in a way that does not require the regulator to have information about either the borrower or lender our results isolate the way in which specific institutions surrounding bankruptcy namely rules governing asset garnishment and fraudulent conveyances support loan markets in which borrowers have no collateral