Anticipation, learning and welfare : the case of distortionary taxation

Abstract

We study the impact of anticipated fiscal policy changes in a Ramsey economy where agents form long-horizon expectations using adaptive learning. We ex- tend the existing framework by introducing distortionary taxes as well as elastic labour supply, which makes agents' decisions non-predetermined but more realistic. We detect that the dynamic responses to anticipated tax changes under learning have oscillatory behaviour that can be interpreted as self-ful lling waves of optimism and pessimism emerging from systematic forecast errors. Moreover, we demonstrate that these waves can have important implications for the welfare consequences of fiscal reforms.