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Individuals, married couples respond differently to U.S. income tax changes
Changes in effective income taxes can impact labor supply with different outcomes for married couples and singles, and changes can have a particularly notable impact on married women.
Working Paper
Consumption and Hours in the United States and Europe
We document large differences between the United States and Europe in allocations of expenditures and time for both market and home activities. Using a life-cycle model with home production and endogenous retirement, we find that the cross-country differences in consumption tax, social security system, income tax and TFP together can account for 68-95 percent of the cross-country variations and more than half of the average differences between Europe and the United States in aggregate hours and expenditures. These factors can also account well for the cross-country differences in allocations ...
Working Paper
Demographic Aging, Industrial Policy, and Chinese Economic Growth
We examine the role of demographics and changing industrial policies in ac- counting for the rapid rise in household savings and in per capita output growth in China since the mid-1970s. The demographic changes come from reductions in the fertility rate and increases in the life expectancy, while the industrial policies take many forms. These policies cause important structural changes; first benefiting private labor-intensive firms by incentivizing them to increase their share of employment, and later on benefiting capital-intensive firms resulting in an increasing share of capital devoted ...
Working Paper
Are Marriage-Related Taxes and Social Security Benefits Holding Back Female Labor Supply?
In the United States, both taxes and old age Social Security benefits depend on one's marital status and tend to discourage the labor supply of the secondary earner. To what extent are these provisions holding back female labor supply? We estimate a rich life cycle model of labor supply and savings for couples and singles using the method of simulated moments (MSM) on the 1945 and 1955 birth-year cohorts and use it to evaluate what would happen without these provisions. Our model matches well the life cycle profiles of labor market participation, hours, and savings for married and single ...
Working Paper
The Lost Ones: The Opportunities and Outcomes of Non-College-Educated Americans Born in the 1960s
White, non-college-educated Americans born in the 1960s face shorter life expectancies, higher medical expenses, and lower wages per unit of human capital compared with those born in the 1940s, and men's wages declined more than women's. After documenting these changes, we use a life-cycle model of couples and singles to evaluate their effects. The drop in wages depressed the labor supply of men and increased that of women, especially in married couples. Their shorter life expectancy reduced their retirement savings but the increase in out-of-pocket medical expenses increased them by more. ...
Working Paper
Home production and Social Security reform
This paper incorporates home production into a dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations with endogenous retirement to study Social Security reforms. As such, the model differentiates both consumption goods and labor effort according to their respective roles in home production and market activities. Using a calibrated model, we find that eliminating the current pay-as-you-go Social Security system has important implications for both labor supply and consumption decisions and that these decisions are influenced by the presence of a home production technology. Comparing our ...
Working Paper
Why Do Households Save and Work?
This paper develops and estimates a dynamic life-cycle model to quantify why households save and work. The model incorporates multiple sources of risk—health, marital status, wages, medical expenses and mortality—as well as endogenous labor supply and human capital accumulation, retirement, and bequest motives at the death of the first and last household member. We estimate it using PSID and HRS data for the 1941–1945 cohort via the Method of Simulated Moments. Eliminating bequest motives reduces aggregate wealth by 23.8% and labor earnings by 1.2%; removing medical expenses lowers them ...
State and local governments rake in surpluses after pandemic
The existence of large sums in state and local government coffers runs counter to historic post-recession trends. State and local governments usually grapple with budget shortfalls due to rising social program demands and weak revenue streams following recessions.
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Piketty’s Book and Macro Models of Wealth Inequality
Thomas Piketty?s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is, in the author?s own words, a book about the history of the distribution of income and wealth. Among other interesting and important facts, the book quantifies the evolution of wealth inequality and wealth concentration over time and across a number of countries. Wealth is highly concentrated, and its distribution is skewed with a long right tail; a small number of very rich individuals hold a large share of total wealth in the economy.
Working Paper
Demographic Transition, Industrial Policies and Chinese Economic Growth
We build a unified framework to quantitatively examine the demographic transition and industrial policies in contributing to China’s economic growth between 1976 and 2015. We find that the demographic transition and industrial policy changes by themselves account for a large fraction of the rise in household and corporate savings relative to total output and the rise in the country’s per capita output growth. Importantly, their interactions also lead to a sizable fraction of the increases in savings since the late 1980s and reduce growth after 2010. A novel and important factor that ...