Optimal Fiscal Policy without Commitment: Revisiting Lucas-Stokey
推翻了卢卡斯-斯托基关于政府可通过债务期限结构保证最优财政政策承诺的结论，指出存在一个被忽视的承诺问题，即未来政府未必会在拉弗曲线峰值以上征税，即使事前最优。
According to the Lucas-Stokey result, a government can structure its debt maturity to guarantee commitment to optimal fiscal policy by future governments. In this paper, we overturn this conclusion, showing that it does not generally hold in the same model and under the same definition of time consistency as in Lucas-Stokey. Our argument rests on the existence of an overlooked commitment problem that cannot be remedied with debt maturity: a government in the future will not necessarily tax above the peak of the Laffer curve, even if it is ex ante optimal to do so.