Knowledge that Transforms

Budget deficits implying an unbounded present value of government debt are infeasible and, hence, induce expectations of a future policy change. The authors study how expectations of a policy switch, whose timing or mix between expenditure cuts, tax increases, or increases in money growth rates may be uncertain, affect economic dynamics before the switch takes place. They are especially concerned with the correlation between changes in the deficit and inflation. Of particular interest is their finding that timing uncertainty may induce fluctuations in the rate of inflation that seem to be unrelated to the budget deficit, at a time when the budget deficit is responsible for inflation.

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.

This paper considers an economy in which policymakers with different preferences alternate in office as a result of elections. Government debt is used strategically by each policymaker to influence the choices of his successors. If different policymakers disagree about the desired composition of government spending between two public goods, the economy exhibits a deficits bias; that is, debt accumulation is higher than it would be with a social planner. The equilibrium level of debt is larger the larger is the degree of polarization between alternating governments and the less likely it is that the current government will be re-elected.

The sovereign-debt literature has often implicitly assumed that all the power in the bargaining game between debtor and creditor lies with the latter. This paper explores that assumption by analyzing three game-theoretic models of debt renegotiations. In two of the models, both of which are built on the traditional one-sector growth model, all the subgame-perfect equilibria have an extreme form in which the game's surplus is captured by the creditor. The third game has many subgame-perfect equilibria that do not have this feature, however. The roles of various assumptions in all three games are examined.

This paper analyzes a multiperiod version of the Spence Job Market Signalling Model in which workers cannot commit to an education choice and firms make wage offers at any point in time. The dynamic competition combined with the incomplete information yield a multiplicity of sequential equilibria, including ones that sustain implicit collusion, even though the length of the game is finite. Emphasis is placed on equilibria that satisfy the “independence of never weak best response” criterion of Kohlberg and Mertens (1986). It is shown that in the limit, as the time between offers tends to zero, any such equilibrium results (in expectation) in the unique stable outcome of the static Spence model.

Generally, structural job search models are taken to be stationary. In this paper models are examined in which every exogenous variable can cause nonstationarity, for instance because its value is dependent on unemployment duration. A general differential equation that describes the evolution of the reservation wage over time is derived. As an empirical illustration a nonstationary structural model is estimated that focuses on the consequences of a downward shift in the level of benefits. It appears that the elasticity of duration with respect to the level of benefits after the shift is much larger than the elasticity with respect to the level before the shift.