Different beliefs about the fairness of social competition and what determines income inequality influence the redistributive policy chosen in a society. But the composition of income in equilibrium depends on tax policies. We show how the interaction between social beliefs and welfare policies may lead to multiple equilibria or multiple steady states. If a society believes that individual effort determines income, and that all have a right to enjoy the fruits of their effort, it will choose low redistribution and low taxes. In equilibrium, effort will be high and the role of luck will be limited, in which case market outcomes will be relatively fair and social beliefs will be self-fulfilled. If, instead, a society believes that luck, birth, connections, and/or corruption determine wealth, it will levy high taxes, thus distorting allocations and making these beliefs self-sustained as well. These insights may help explain the cross-country variation in perceptions about income inequality and choices of redistributive policies.

This paper responds to the comment of Di Tella and Dubra (2013). We first clarify that the model of Alesina and Angeletos (2005) admits two distinct types of multiplicity: one that is at the core of their contribution, and a separate one that is at work in Di Tella and Dubra's example. We then proceed to show how Alesina and Angeletos's results are robust to alternative specifications of the voting mechanism.

We study optimal policy in an economy where interest rates are low because public debt serves as collateral or buffer stock. Issuing more public debt raises welfare by easing the underlying friction but also reduces the private valuation of this service, raising interest rates. This trade-off shapes the optimal quantity of public debt in the long run, justifies a departure from tax smoothing in the short run, and calls for larger deficits during financial crises. Our analysis illustrates the possible robustness of these insights to different microfoundations and helps clarify when exactly low interest rates represent an opportunity for cheap government borrowing.

We revisit the question of why shifts in aggregate demand drive business cycles. Our theory combines intertemporal substitution in production with rational confusion, or bounded rationality, in consumption and investment. The first element allows aggregate supply to respond to shifts in aggregate demand without nominal rigidity. The second introduces a “confidence multiplier,” that is, a positive feedback loop between real economic activity, consumer expectations of permanent income, and investor expectations of returns. This mechanism amplifies the business-cycle fluctuations triggered by demand shocks (but not necessarily those triggered by supply shocks); it helps investment to comove with consumption; and it allows front-loaded fiscal stimuli to crowd in private spending.

Does welfare improve when firms are better informed about the state of the economy and can thus better coordinate their production and pricing decisions? We address this question in an elementary business-cycle model that highlights how the dispersion of information can impede both kinds of decisions and, in this sense, be the source of both real and nominal rigidity. Within this context we develop a taxonomy for how the social value of information depends on the two rigidities, on the sources of the business cycle, and on the conduct of monetary policy.

This paper analyzes equlibrium and welfare for a tractable class of economies (games) with externalities, strategic complementarity or substitutability, and heterogenous information. First, we characterize the equilibrium use of information; complementarity heightens the sensitivity of equilibrium actions to public information, raising aggregate volatility, whereas substitutability heightens the sensitivity to private information, cross-sectional dispersion. Next, we define and characterize an efficiency benchmark designed to address whether the equilibrium use of information is optimal from a social perspective; the efficient use of information reflects the social value of aligning choices across agents. Finally, we examine the comparative statics of equilibrium welfare with respect to the information structure; the social value of information is best understood by classifying economies according to the inefficiency, if any, in the equilibrium use of information. We conclude with a few applications, including production externalities, beauty contests, business cycles, and large Cournot and Bertrand games.

How does the economy respond to news about future policies or future fundamentals? Standard practice assumes that agents have common knowledge of such news and face no uncertainty about how others will respond. Relaxing this assumption attenuates the general equilibrium effects of news and rationalizes a form of myopia at the aggregate level. We establish these insights within a class of games which nests, but is not limited to, the New Keynesian model. Our results help resolve the forward-guidance puzzle, offer a rationale for the front-loading of fiscal stimuli, and illustrate more broadly the fragility of predictions that rest on long series of forward-looking feedback loops.

We propose a new strategy for dissecting the macroeconomic time series, provide a template for the business-cycle propagation mechanism that best describes the data, and use its properties to appraise models of both the parsimonious and the medium-scale variety. Our findings support the existence of a main business-cycle driver but rule out the following candidates for this role: technology or other shocks that map to TFP movements; news about future productivity; and inflationary demand shocks of the textbook type. Models aimed at accommodating demand-driven cycles without a strict reliance on nominal rigidity appear promising.

We ask how fiscal deficits are financed in environments with two key features: (i) nominal rigidity, and (ii) a violation of Ricardian equivalence due to finite lives or liquidity constraints. In such environments, deficits can contribute to their own financing through two channels: a boom in real economic activity, which expands the tax base; and a surge in inflation, which erodes the real value of nominal government debt. Our main theoretical result establishes that this mechanism becomes more potent as fiscal adjustment is delayed, leading to full self‐financing in the limit: if the monetary authority does not lean too heavily against the fiscal stimulus, then the government can run a deficit today, refrain from tax hikes or spending cuts in the future, and still see its debt converge back to its initial level. We further demonstrate that a significant degree of self‐financing is achievable when the theory is disciplined by empirical evidence on marginal propensities to consume, nominal rigidities, the monetary policy reaction, and the speed of fiscal adjustment.