Servicing the Public Debt: The Role of Expectations
[We study models in which debt repudiation--openly or through inflation--is possible. The government maximizes the utility of the representative individual, and we focus on no-precommitment equilibria of the Barro-Gordon type. We show cases in which the existence of government bonds generate multiple perfect-foresight equilibria. However, price indexation and/or interest-rate ceilings are shown to be possible solutions of the equilibrium multiplicity problem.]