Fiscal policy under loose commitment

Davide Debortoli and Ricardo Nunes

Journal of Economic Theory, 2010, vol. 145, issue 3, 1005-1032

Abstract: Due to time-inconsistency or political turnover, policymakers' promises are not always fulfilled. We analyze an optimal fiscal policy problem where the plans made by the benevolent government are periodically revised. In this loose commitment setting, the properties of labor and capital income taxes are significantly different than under the full-commitment and no-commitment assumptions. Because of the occasional reoptimizations, the average capital income tax is positive even in the long-run. Also, the autocorrelation of taxes is lower, their volatility with respect to output increases and the correlation between capital income taxes and output changes sign. Our method can be used to analyze the plausibility and the importance of commitment in a wide-class of dynamic problems.

Keywords: Commitment; No-commitment; Fiscal; policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (86)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022-0531(09)00117-3
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jetheo:v:145:y:2010:i:3:p:1005-1032

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Theory is currently edited by A. Lizzeri and K. Shell

More articles in Journal of Economic Theory from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().