Paper #1687

Título:

Optimal fiscal policy without commitment: Revisiting Lucas-Stokey

Autores:

Davide Debortoli, Ricardo Nunes y Pierre Yared

Fecha:

Febrero 2019 (Revisado: Septiembre 2020)

Resumen:

According to the Lucas-Stokey result, a government can structure its debt maturity to guarantee commitment to optimal fiscal policy by future governments. In this paper, we overturn this conclusion, showing that it does not generally hold in the same model and under the same definition of time-consistency as in Lucas-Stokey. Our argument rests on the existence of an overlooked commitment problem that cannot be remedied with debt maturity: a government in the future will not necessarily tax above the peak of the Laer curve, even if it is ex-ante optimal to do so.

Palabras clave:

Public debt, optimal taxation, fiscal policy

Códigos JEL:

H63, H21, E62

Área de investigación:

Macroeconomía y Economía Internacional

Comentario:

Attachments:
Online Appendix

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