Search Results
Journal Article
Social Security: are we getting our money's worth?
An examination of Social Security from an individual investment perspective, showing that continued delays in addressing the program's shortcomings will only increase the intergenerational inequities that now exist.
Journal Article
Is public capital productive? A review of the evidence
An examination of the empirical evidence regarding the productive effects of public capital on the U.S. economy, concluding that although boosting infrastructure investment might have a positive impact on private output, the magnitude of the effect is unclear.
Journal Article
Tax structure, optimal fiscal policy, and the business cycle
The development of a real business cycle model in which government fiscal variables such as tax rates and public expenditures are endogenous. The authors characterize the "optimal" behavior of these policy variables over the business cycle and relate this behavior to movements in private-sector variables like output, consumption, labor hours, and investment.
Journal Article
Tax structure and welfare in a model of optimal fiscal policy
A study of the welfare implications of some basic structural features of the U.S. tax code, including the tax deductibility of depreciation and the practice of taxing labor income differently than capital income. The results show that long-run welfare and output can be improved by a policy of accelerated depreciation, whereby the depreciation rate for tax purposes exceeds the rate of economic depreciation.
Conference Paper
Computable general equilibrium models and monetary policy advice
Working Paper
Welfare, stabilization, or growth: a comparison of different fiscal objectives
An argument that stabilization produces welfare levels nearly identical to those of welfare maximation, and that both these policies yield large welfare gains and modest growth losses relative to growth maximization policies.
Working Paper
Growth effects of a flat tax.
A presentation of a quantitative general equilibrium model showing that a revenue-neutral flat tax can permanently boost per capita growth by 0.18 to 0.85 percentage point annually, and that the lower marginal tax rate and the full investment write-off are both important contributors to the increased growth.
Working Paper
Tax structure, welfare, and the stability of equilibrium in a model of dynamic optimal fiscal policy
A demonstration that the assumed structure of taxation can have dramatic effects on economic welfare and on the stability of the steady state in a dynamic general-equilibrium model of optimal fiscal policy. The authors find that household welfare is highest under a structure that includes separate tax rates on labor and capital incomes, double taxation of dividends, and tax-deductible depreciation.
Working Paper
Optimal fiscal policy when public capital is productive: a business- cycle perspective
An examination of the business cycle implications of productive public capital in a two-sector, dynamic general-equilibrium model with optimal fiscal policy. In simulations, public investment and public consumption move procyclically, and the capital tax is more variable than the labor tax--features also observed in annual U.S. data.
Working Paper
Computable general-equilibrium models and monetary policy advice
An argument that variations of extant general-equilibrium monetary models can generate real-time economic forecasts comparable in accuracy to those contained in the Federal Reserve Board's "Greenbook" briefing documents.