The Welfare Implications of Fiscal Dominance

Carlos de Resende and Nooman Rebei

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: This paper studies the interdependence between fiscal and monetary policy in a DSGE model with sticky prices and non-zero trend inflation. We characterize the fiscal and monetary policies by a rule whereby a given fraction k of the government debt must be backed by the discounted value of current and future primary surpluses. The remaining fraction of debt is backed by seigniorage revenues. When k = 1, there is no fiscal dominance, since the fiscal authority backs all debt and accommodates (independent) monetary policy, by adjusting current or future primary surpluses to satisfy the government’s intertemporal budget constraint. If k = 0, all debt is backed by the monetary authority and there is complete fiscal dominance. A continuum of possibilities lies between these two polar cases. We numerically show that: 1) the degree of fiscal dominance, as measured by (1 - k), is positively related to trend inflation, and 2) when prices are sticky, k has significant effects on the business cycle dynamics. The model is estimated using Bayesian techniques. Estimates of k imply a high degree of fiscal dominance in both Mexico and South Korea, but almost no fiscal dominance in Canada and the U.S. The country-specific estimates of the structural parameters are used in a second-order approximation of the equilibrium around the deterministic steady-state to evaluate the welfare costs of fiscal dominance. Results suggest significant welfare losses for countries with high degrees of fiscal dominance.

Keywords: Economic models; Fiscal policy; Inflation: costs and benefits; Monetary policy framework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 E42 E50 E63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/wp08-28.pdf

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:bca:bocawp:08-28

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().