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The economic effects of restrictions on government budget deficits

Author Info

Listed author(s):
  • Ghiglino, Christian

    (Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School)

  • Shell, Karl

    (Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School)

Abstract

In overlapping-generations economies with perfect financial markets and lumpsum taxation, restrictions on the government budget deficits do not limit the set of achievable allocations. For economies in which tax instruments are distortionary and limited in number, deficits are irrelevant only in the unrealistic case in which the number of tax instruments is large relative to the number of policy goals. In particular, if the government can use only anonymous consumption taxes, then achieving the prescribed deficits without changing the equilibrium allocation will typically be impossible when the number of consumers exceeds the number of commodities. A similar result holds if consumer credit is (exogenously) restricted. Surprisingly, in this case, distortionary taxes may be more likely than lump-sum taxes to lead to the irrelevance of government deficits. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D51, D91, E32. Keywords: Balanced Budget, Balanced-Budget Amendment, Burden of the Public Debt, Comparative Statics, Consumption Taxes, Credit Restrictions, Distortionary Taxes, Economic Policy, Government Budget Deficit, Maastricht Treaty, Optimal Taxation, Overlapping Generations.

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File URL: http://openarchive.cbs.dk/cbsweb/handle/10398/7542
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Paper provided by Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number 03-1998.

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Length: 39 pages
Date of creation: 01 Jan 1998
Handle: RePEc:hhs:cbsnow:1998_003
Contact details of provider: Postal:
Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads 3 C, 5. sal, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark

Phone: 38 15 25 75
Fax: 38 15 34 99
Web page: http://www.cbs.dk/departments/econ/
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  • G10 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)

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  1. Goenka, Aditya, 1994. "Fiscal Rules and Extrinsic Uncertainty," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 4(3), pages 401-416, May.
  2. Balasko, Yves & Shell, Karl, 1981. "The overlapping-generations model. II. The case of pure exchange with money," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 24(1), pages 112-142, February.
  3. Woodford, Michael, 1986. "Stationary sunspot equilibria in a finance constrained economy," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 128-137, October.
  4. Henning Bohn & Robert P. Inman, "undated". "Balanced Budget Rules and Public Deficits: Evidence from the U.S. States (Reprint 060)," Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research Working Papers 10-96, Wharton School Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research.
  5. Barro, Robert J, 1974. "Are Government Bonds Net Wealth?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 82(6), pages 1095-1117, Nov.-Dec..
  6. Diamond, Peter A & Mirrlees, James A, 1971. "Optimal Taxation and Public Production II: Tax Rules," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 61(3), pages 261-278, June.
  7. Keister, Todd, 1998. "Money Taxes and Efficiency When Sunspots Matter," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 43-68, November.
  8. Auerbach, Alan J & Gokhale, Jagadeesh & Kotlikoff, Laurence J, 1992. " Generational Accounting: A New Approach to Understanding the Effects of Fiscal Policy on Saving," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 94(2), pages 303-318.
  9. James M. Poterba, 1996. "Do Budget Rules Work?," NBER Working Papers 5550, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  10. Grandmont, Jean-Michel, 1986. "Stabilizing competitive business cycles," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 57-76, October.
  11. Gale, David, 1973. "Pure exchange equilibrium of dynamic economic models," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 6(1), pages 12-36, February.
  12. Paul A. Samuelson, 1958. "An Exact Consumption-Loan Model of Interest with or without the Social Contrivance of Money," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 66, pages 467-467.
  13. Heller, Walter P & Shell, Karl, 1974. "On Optimal Taxation with Costly Administration," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 64(2), pages 338-345, May.
  14. Balasko, Yves & Shell, Karl, 1980. "The overlapping-generations model, I: The case of pure exchange without money," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 23(3), pages 281-306, December.
  15. Smith, Bruce D, 1994. "Efficiency and Determinacy of Equilibrium under Inflation Targeting," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 4(3), pages 327-344.
  16. Bohn, Henning & Inman, Robert P., 1996. "Balanced-budget rules and public deficits: evidence from the U.S. states," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(1), pages 13-76, December.
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Cited by:

  1. Bhattacharya, Joydeep & Guzman, Mark G. & Shell, Karl, 1998. "Price Level Volatility: A Simple Model of Money Taxes and Sunspots," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 81(2), pages 401-430, August.
  2. Richard Evans & Kerk Phillips, 2014. "OLG Life Cycle Model Transition Paths: Alternate Model Forecast Method," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 43(1), pages 105-131, January.
  3. Chari, V. V., 2000. "Limits of Markets and Limits of Governments: An Introduction to a Symposium on Political Economy," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 94(1), pages 1-6, September.
  4. Martín Gonzalez-Eiras & Dirk Niepelt, 2012. "Economic and Politico-Economic Equivalence," Working Papers 12.02, Swiss National Bank, Study Center Gerzensee.
  5. Huberto M. Ennis & Todd Keister, 2001. "Optimal policy with probabilistic equilibrium selection," Working Paper 01-03, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
  6. Dirk Niepelt & Martin Gonzalez-Eiras, 2008. "Economic and Politico-Economic Equivalence of Fiscal Policies," 2008 Meeting Papers 631, Society for Economic Dynamics.
  7. Kotlikoff, Laurence J., 2002. "Generational policy," Handbook of Public Economics,in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 27, pages 1873-1932 Elsevier.
  8. Sergey Zhavoronkov & Konstantin Yanovskiy & Kirill Rodionov, 2015. "Political Factors of the Cuts and Surges in Government Spending: The Effects on Old Market Democracies and Post-Communist Countries," Working Papers 146, Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, revised 2015.
  9. Martin Gonzalez-Eiras & Dirk Niepelt, 2015. "Politico-Economic Equivalence," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 18(4), pages 843-862, October.
  10. Gaetano Antinolfi & Todd Keister, 2001. "Dollarization as a monetary arrangement for emerging market economies," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Nov., pages 29-40.

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