Fiscal Policy in Debt Constrained Economies

Mark Aguiar and Manuel Amador

No 17457, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the tax on labor goes to zero in the long run, while the tax on capital income may be non-zero, reversing the standard prediction of the Ramsey tax literature. The zero labor tax is an optimal long run outcome if the private agents are impatient relative to the international interest rate and the economy is subject to sovereign debt constraints. The front loading of labor taxes allows the economy to build a large (aggregate) debt position in the presence of limited commitment. We show that a similar result holds in a closed economy with imperfect inter-generational altruism.

JEL-codes: E62 F41 H63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-dge and nep-mac
Note: EFG IFM
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published as Mark Aguiar & Manuel Amador, 2016. "Fiscal policy in debt constrained economies," Journal of Economic Theory, vol 161, pages 37-75.

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Related works:
Journal Article: Fiscal policy in debt constrained economies (2016)
Working Paper: Fiscal Policy in Debt Constrained Economies (2015)
Working Paper: Fiscal Policy in Debt Constrained Economies (2011)
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