Alternative Perspectives on Optimal Public Debt Adjustment

Michal Horvath

The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, 2011, vol. 11, issue 1, 22

Abstract: We compare alternative optimal public debt adjustment strategies in a New Keynesian economy. We find that the unconditionally optimal policy is consistent with a gradual adjustment in public debt towards its mean value at a speed determined by the rate of time preference of agents. To a second-order approximation in a stochastic setting, debt follows a unit root process with a negative drift under the `timeless-perspective' approach but converges to an unconditional mean different from the non-stochastic steady state in the unconditionally optimal economy. Overall, increases in public debt are shown to be optimally reduced by half only after approximately two decades at best.

Keywords: optimal monetary and fiscal policy; unconditionally optimal policy; timeless perspective; public debt dynamics; second-order approximation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1935-1690.2256 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:bejmac:v:11:y:2011:i:1:n:34

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejm/html

DOI: 10.2202/1935-1690.2256

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics is currently edited by Arpad Abraham and Tiago Cavalcanti

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().