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I show that the zero nominal interest rate bound may render it desirable for society to appoint a fiscally activist policy-maker who cares less about the stabilisation of government spending relative to inflation and output gap stabilisation than the private sector does. I work with a simple New Keynesian model where the government has to decide each period afresh about the optimal level of public consumption and the one period nominal interest rate. A fiscally activist policy-maker uses government spending more aggressively to stabilise inflation and the output gap in a liquidity trap than an authority with preferences identical to those of society as a whole would do. The appointment of an activist policy-maker corrects for discretionary authorities' disregard of the expectations channel, thereby reducing the welfare costs associated with zero bound events.

AbstractThis paper investigates the information content of domestic macroeconomic developments for the determination of nominal long‐term interest rates in the G7. We show that when an econometric methodology is followed, which takes into account the stationarity, cointegration, and exogeneity features of the data, well‐specified equations can be estimated, which confirm the importance of fiscal and monetary developments in the determination of long‐term interest rates. The results are contrary to those that one would expect from standard finance theory, which suggests that interest rates are determined by market participants. They reveal that inflation uncertainty and the quality of debt are important factors in each of the countries considered. In addition, there is a high degree of uniformity in the structure of the estimated relationships, suggesting that economic performance is of greater importance than institutional diversity in the determination of long‐term rates.

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