Welfare Improving Coordination of Fiscal and Monetary Policy

Andrew Hughes Hallett, Jan Libich and Petr Stehlík ()
Additional contact information
Petr Stehlík: University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic, http://www.zcu.cz/en/

Czech Economic Review, 2011, vol. 5, issue 1, 007-026

Abstract: Should independent monetary and fiscal policies coordinate their actions and/or targets? To examine this question the paper considers a simple reduced-form model in which monetary and fiscal policies are formally independent, but still interdependent—through their mutual spillovers. The analysis shows that the medium-run equilibrium levels of inflation, deficit, and output depend on the two policies’ (i) potency (elasticity of output with respect to the policy instruments), (ii) ambition (the level of their output target), and (iii) conservatism (inflation vs. output volatility aversion). What matters is however the relative degrees of these characteristics across the two policies rather than the absolute degrees for each policy. This implies that coordination of monetary and fiscal policy is superior to non-cooperative Nash behaviour. In particular, we find that ambition-coordination is more important than conservatism-coordination in terms of avoiding medium-run imbalances due to a tug-of-war betw een the policies. For this reason, and perhaps surprisingly, ambition-coordination can be welfare improving even if the policymakers’ objectives are idiosyncratic, and their coordinated output targets differ from the socially optimal value.

Keywords: Coordination; interaction; monetary policy; fiscal policy; central bank; government; inflation; deficit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E61 E63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://auco.fsv.cuni.cz/storage/101_2011_01_007.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: WELFARE IMPROVING COORDINATION OF FISCAL AND MONETARY POLICY (2008)
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:fau:aucocz:au2011_007

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://auco.cuni.cz/

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Czech Economic Review from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lenka Stastna ().