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Working Paper
Fiscal Foresight and Perverse Distortions to Firm Behavior: Anticipatory Dips and Compensating Rebounds
We study the conditions under which fiscal foresight – forward-looking agents anticipating future policy changes – results in perverse economic behavior through unintended intertemporal tradeoffs. Somewhat surprisingly, fiscal foresight by itself is far from sufficient for policy-induced incentives to perversely distort firm behavior. Rather, we show that there are two additional sets of conditions, at least one of which must hold to generate perverse behavior: (i) storable output, diminishing returns, and a non- competitive output market; (ii) “rolling base” policy design and ...