Suchergebnisse

This book studies the sustainability and optimality of public debt under different scenarios: the closed economy, the small open economy, and a two-country setting. Sustainability refers to the existence and the stability of the long-run equilibrium. Optimality relates to the path of public debt that maximizes discounted utility. The analysis is conducted within the framework of the Solow model, the overlapping generations model and the infinite horizon model. The government can follow different strategies, it either fixes the deficit ratio or the tax rate. As a result, a fixed deficit ratio generally can be sustained. By contrast, a fixed tax rate generally cannot be sustained. Depending on the chosen fiscal strategy, there exists either an optimal deficit ratio or an optimal tax rate that maximizes the sum of consumption and government purchases per capita.

The connection of economic theory and behavior is one of the central topics of this book - and also a central issue in economic thinking of Horst Todt to whom this book is dedicated. The contributions deal with topics of normative and descriptive decision-making: They investigate, for instance, the emergence of decisions or the role of imitation as a competitive principle. A number of contributions treat special decision-making problems on a micro or on a macro level, whereas others concentrate on the principle questions of decision-making or on the conceptualization of important but fuzzy notions like power or solidarity