you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

We examine the limiting behavior of cooperative and noncooperative fiscal policies as countries' market power goes to zero. We show that these policies converge if countries raise revenues through lump-sum taxation. However, if there are unremovable domestic distortions, such as distorting taxes, there can be gains to coordination even when a single country's policy cannot affect world prices. These results differ from the received wisdom in the optimal tariff literature. The key distinction is that, contrary to the tariff literature, the spending decisions of governments are explicitly modeled.

We propose a definition of time-consistent policy for infinite-horizon economies with competitive private agents. Allocations and policies are defined as functions of the history of past policies. A sustainable equilibrium is a sequence of history-contingent policies and allocations that satisfy certain sequential optimality conditions for the government and for private agents. We provide a complete characterization of the sustainable equilibrium outcomes for a variant of Fischer's model of capital taxation. We also relate our work to recent developments in the theory of repeated games.

Manufacturing plants have a clear life cycle: they are born small, grow substantially with age, and eventually die. Economists have long thought that this life cycle is driven by organization capital, the accumulation of plant‐specific knowledge. The location of plants in the life cycle determines the size of the payments, or organization rents, plant owners receive from organization capital. These payments are compensation for the interest cost to plant owners of waiting for their plants to grow. We use a quantitative growth model of the life cycle of plants, along with U.S. data, to infer the overall size of these payments.

This paper develops the quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model. In a stationary equilibrium, the ex ante tax rate on capital income is approximately zero. There is an equivalence class of ex post capital income tax rates and bond policies that support a given allocation. Within this class, the optimal ex post capital tax rates can range from close to independently and identically distributed to close to a random walk. The tax rate on labor income fluctuates very little and inherits the persistence properties of the exogenous shocks; thus there is no presumption that optimal labor tax rates follow a random walk. Most of the welfare gains realized by switching from a tax system like that of the United States to the Ramsey system come from an initial period of high taxation on capital income.

We examine the limiting behavior of cooperative and noncooperative fiscal policies as countries' market power goes to zero. We show that these policies converge if countries raise revenues through lump-sum taxation. However, if there are unremovable domestic distortions, such as distorting taxes, there can be gains to coordination even when a single country's policy cannot affect world prices. These results differ from the received wisdom in the optimal tariff literature. The key distinction is that, contrary to the tariff literature, the spending decisions of governments are explicitly modeled.

During the Great Recession, US regions that experienced large declines in household debt also experienced large drops in consumption, employment, and wages. We develop a search and matching model in which tighter debt constraints raise the cost of investing in new job vacancies and so reduce job-finding rates and employment. On-the-job human capital accumulation is critical to generating sizable drops in employment: it increases the duration of the benefit flows from posting vacancies, thereby amplifying the employment drop from a credit tightening 10-fold relative to the standard model. Our model reproduces the salient cross-regional features of the US Great Recession.

We analyze the effects of money injections on interest rates and exchange rates when agents must pay a Baumol‐Tobin‐style fixed cost to exchange bonds and money. Asset markets are endogenously segmented because this fixed cost leads agents to trade bonds and money infrequently. When the government injects money through an open market operation, only those agents that are currently trading absorb these injections. Through their impact on these agents’ consumption, these money injections affect real interest rates and real exchange rates. The model generates the observed negative relation between expected inflation and real interest rates as well as persistent liquidity effects in interest rates and volatile and persistent exchange rates.

The authors ask whether a two-country business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles. With this question in mind, the authors document a number of discrepancies between theory and data. The most striking discrepancy concerns the correlations of consumption and output across countries. In this data, outputs are generally more highly correlated across countries than consumptions. In the model they see the opposite.

Recent empirical work on financial crises documents that crises tend to occur when macroeconomic fundamentals are weak; but even after conditioning on an exhaustive list of fundamentals, a sizable random component to crises and associated capital flows remains. We develop a model of herd behavior consistent with these observations. Informational frictions together with standard debt default problems lead to volatile capital flows resembling hot money and financial crises. We show that repaying debt during difficult times identifies a government as financially resilient, enhances its reputation, and stabilizes capital flows. Bailing out governments deprives resilient countries of the opportunity to differentiate themselves from the nonresilient.