Recent research projects

Government Investment and the European Stability and Growth Pact (joint with Vadym Lepetyuk)

Economic Perspectives, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, vol. 31 n.3, pp.33-43. A more complete version is available as
NBER Working Paper no. 13200

Fiscal Theory of the Price Level

The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, forthcoming, Palgrave MacMillan, reproduced with permission. This article is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been reviewed or edited.

Redistribution, Taxes, and the Median Voter (joint with Jess Benhabib) 

Published in Review of Economic Dynamics (2006), vol.9, n.2, pp. 211-223.

Working paper version (contains some typos)

Tax Riots (joint with Christopher Phelan)

Review of Economic Studies (2008), vol. 75, n.3, pp. 649-669.
A slightly older version is available as Working Paper, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (2006) n.4.

Negative Nominal Interest Rates

This is a more detailed version of the paper published in the American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings) (2004), vol.94, n.2, pp. 104-108.

 On the Irrelevance of Government Debt when Taxes are Distortionary (joint with Narayana Kocherlakota)

Published in Journal of Monetary Economics (2004), vol.51 n.2, pp.299-304.

Preprint version

 Politics and Efficiency of Separating Capital and Ordinary Government Budgets (joint with Thomas J. Sargent)

Published in Quarterly Journal of Economics (2006), vol.121 n.4, pp.1167-1210. Older versions are available as NBER Working paper #11030, 2005, and from this web page.  

A Game-Theoretic View of the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level

Econometrica (2002), vol.70 n.6, pp.2167-2195; an earlier version is available as Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Working Paper #612, March 2001 

Equilibrium and Government Commitment

Journal of Economic Theory (2005), vol. 124, n.1, pp.79-105. A slightly older version is available as

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Working Paper #624, September 2002

Optimal Fiscal Policy with Heterogeneous Agents

 Last update: February 1999 (new PDF file posted in September, fixes typos)
 Abstract
 Paper in PDF format
 Plots in PDF format
 Paper in PS format
 Plots in PS format

Political Economy of Taxation in an Overlapping-Generations Economy

Review of Economic Dynamics (2008), vol. 11, n.1, pp. 18-43. An earlier version is available as

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Discussion Paper #133, December 1999

Software code used in the papers above

Some of this material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0095766 and 0419771. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).