The time consistency of monetary and fiscal policies

Fernando Alvarez, Patrick Kehoe and Pablo Neumeyer

No 305, Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: We show that optimal monetary and fiscal policies are time consistent for a class of economies often used in applied work, economies appealing because they are consistent with the growth facts. We establish our results in two steps. We first show that for this class of economies, the Friedman rule of setting nominal interest rates to zero is optimal under commitment. We then show that optimal policies are time consistent if the Friedman rule is optimal. For our benchmark economy in which the time consistency problem is most severe, the converse also holds: if optimal policies are time consistent, then the Friedman rule is optimal.

Keywords: Interest rates; Fiscal policy; Monetary policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-dge and nep-mon
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Econometrica (Vol. 72, No. 2, March 2004, pp. 541-567)

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Working Paper: The time consistency of monetary and fiscal policies (2002)
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