inflation taxation and welfare with externalities and leisure this paper examines how inflation taxation affects resource allocation and welfare in a neoclassical growth model with leisure a production externality and money in the utility function switching from consumption taxation to inflation taxation to finance government spending reduces real money balances relative to income but increases consumption labor capital and output the net welfare effect of this switch depends crucially on the strength of the externality and on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution while it is always negative without the externality it is likely to be positive with a strong externality and elastic intertemporal substitution

involuntary non standard employment and the economic crisis regional insights from the uk green a e and livanos i involuntary non standard employment and the economic crisis regional insights from the uk regional studies increases in unemployment and non employment in the 2008 2009 economic crisis were less marked than expected in the uk given experience of previous recessions to capture more fully the regional dimensions of economic crisis it is necessary to look also at employment using labour force survey lfs data on involuntary part time working and involuntary temporary working a measure of involuntary non standard employment ine is constructed econometric analyses reveal that there were rises in ine alongside unemployment increases in the economic crisis and that young people individuals from non white ethnic groups and those in weak regional economies were particularly at risk of ine

capital taxation and accumulation in a life cycle growth model almost all of the serious economic work on savings decisions within the past decade has relied on some variant of the life cycle hypothesis in which savings arise out of individual choices of an optimum lifetime consumption path this paper reexamines the incidence and welfare consequences of capital income taxes within a realistic life cycle model the results suggest that the elimination of capital income taxation would have very substantial economic effects for example a complete shift to consumption taxation might raise steady state output by as much as 18 percent and consumption by 16 percent the long run welfare gain from such a shift would for plausible parameter values exceed 150 billion annually stated somewhat differently shifting to consumption taxation would raise the lifetime utility of the representative consumer by the equivalent of about six years income in the new steady state these estimates dwarf estimates of the static welfare cost of taxation and significantly exceed even extreme previous estimates of the dynamic loss this study departs from earlier analyses of the effects of taxes on capital income in several respects probably the most important difference between this treatment and most preceding ones lies in the assumptions about the interest elasticity of saving it is shown below that the common two period formulation of saving decisions yields quite misleading results a more realistic model of life cycle savings demonstrates that for a wide variety of plausible parameter values savings are very interest elastic this implies that shifting away from capital income taxation would significantly increase capital formation making possible long run increases in consumption many studies of the welfare effects of capital income taxation have ignored the general equilibrium effects of increased capital formation in an economy with life cycle savings there is no presumption that the undistorted growth path corresponds to any sort of social optimum as peter diamond has shown life cycle savings can lead to a steady state capital intensity either greater or less than the golden rule level more generally it is clear that there is no reason to believe that a life cycle economy will maximize any particular intertemporal social welfare function a fundamental tenet of welfare evaluation is that preexisting distortions must be considered in evaluating the consequences of tax changes the results presented in this paper take explicit account of the nonoptimal character of the no tax steady state this explains in large part why such a sizeable welfare effect of capital taxes is found in an economy far from the golden rule level of capital intensity there are substantial gains in steady state consumption achievable through increased capital formation section i of the paper examines the aggregate savings function in a continuous time life cycle framework the second section clarifies the differences between wage and consumption taxes an aggregate production function is added to complete the model in the third section the effects of changes in capital taxes on both steady state incidence and welfare are considered within a general equilibrium framework the final section of the paper discusses some implications of the results and suggests areas which appear to warrant further study assistant professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research analyst national bureau of economic research i am grateful to alan auerbach martin feldstein laurence kotlikoff to the participants in the nber workshop on business taxation and to the harvard public finance seminar for useful discussions james poterba and james buchal performed the numerical calculations

wealth accumulation over the life cycle and precautionary savings this article constructs and simulates a life cycle model of wealth accumulation and estimates the parameters of the utility function the rate of time preference and the coefficient of risk aversion by matching the simulated median wealth profiles with those observed in the panel study of income dynamics and in the survey of consumer finances the estimates imply a low degree of patience and a high degree of risk aversion the results are used to study the importance of precautionary savings in explaining wealth accumulation they imply that wealth accumulation is driven mostly by precautionary motives at the beginning of the life cycle whereas savings for retirement purposes become significant only closer to retirement

international effects of tax reforms in an open economy with international capital flows there is an equivalence relation between income tax consumption tax international borrowing tax and an external interest earning tax this paper analyzes tax reform involving shifts between income and consumption taxes in this setting it is shown that the real effects of such revenue neutral tax reform depend critically on the country s current account position and the nature of the reform in particular whether the world interest rate rises or falls as a consequence of a budget deficit depends on the tax system in force the analysis provides a clear rationale for the international coordination of tax policies copyright 1989 by royal economic society

the economic consequences of federal deficits an examination of the net wealth and instability issues there is currently disagreement over the economic consequences of federal deficits some economists argue that deficits put upward pressure on real interest rates and thereby crowd out interest sensitive private spending others argue that deficits stemming from lump sum tax cuts do not raise interest rates because the response of individuals will be to increase their saving by the full amount of the resulting deficit to enable future generations to service i e make interest and principal payments on the additional debt without curtailing their consumption in other words individuals view debt and taxes as perfect substitutes because debt financed tax cuts imply higher taxes in the future to service that debt this effectively means that there really is no permanent tax cut so there is no increase in private net wealth current consumption or interest rates stated another way the debt that is issued to finance a tax cut does not add to private net wealth because it implies an offsetting future tax liability but if debt is not viewed as implying future tax increases then debt and taxes are not perfect substitutes and increases in debt resulting from tax cuts will indeed add to private net wealth stimulate consumption and raise interest rates 2

cyclical and market determinants of involuntary part time employment we examine the determinants of involuntary part time employment focusing on variation associated with the business cycle and variation attributable to more persistent structural features of the labor market our theoretical framework distinguishes between workers decision to seek part time work and employer demand for part time work hours emphasizing demand and supply determinants of involuntary part time work such as workplace technology labor costs and workforce demographics we conduct regression analyses using state level panel and individual data for the years 2003 2014 the results show that the combination of cyclical variation and the influence of market level factors can explain virtually all of the variation in the aggregate incidence of involuntary part time employment since the great recession

inflation capital taxation and housing the long run in a small open economy this paper deals with the consequences of inflation and capital income taxes for the accumulation of wealth in a small open economy with a housing sector particular attention is paid to the incentive and intergenerational redistribution effects stemming from the interaction of inflation and capital income taxation and to portfolio shifts between housing assets and other assets the authors find that the intergenerational distribution effects and the incentive effects on overall savings tend to offset and sometimes even to dominate several of the expected interasset substitution effects of a change in inflation and capital taxes

explicit interest and demand deposit service charges comment in an interesting recent paper merris 1985 presented a modification of my 1979 model of the effect of a binding demand deposit interest ceiling upon a bank s choice of the level of the service charge per check the model assumes bank profit maximization under certaintys with a perfectly competitive loan market but finite elasticities of consumer demand for savings accounts and demand deposits my earlier version assumed that the consumer determined ratio of checks written n to demand deposit balances d is an ad hoc linear function of the exogenous demand deposit interest rate rd and the service charge per check b that model implied that the bank s response to a change in the rate ceiling db drd is ambiguous in sign regardless of whether the savings account rate rs is fixed or flexible in contrast merris considers two alternative versions of the model in the first n rather than n d is assumed in ad hoc fashion to be linear in rs rd and b this feature results in db drd being unambiguously positive in the case of a fixed rs though still ambiguous in the case of a flexible rs his second and more interesting version attempts to establish a sound grounding in the preexisting theory of the transactions demand for money by applying the barro santomero b s 1972 model of the demands for savings accounts demand deposits and currency which has implications for the number of account transactions he uses nonlinear functions for the quantities of savings accounts s and demand deposits d as well as for the number of transactions merris asserts that the results here are the same as for his linear model db drd is unambiguously positive if rs is exogenously fixed though still ambiguous if rs is flexible section 2 of this comment points out two mistakes in merris s analysis of the model with consumer theoretic underpinnings either of which is sufficient to invalidate his analysis and results then section 3 shows that when these mistakes are corrected the ambiguity in my original paper regarding the sign of db drd is restored except in certain special cases

consumption path following a tax increase implications for the analysis of the welfare cost of taxation abstract the consumption path following a capital income tax increase is analyzed to demonstrate that short run increases in consumption dominate future declines in consumption for a considerable time it takes 25 years before a tax increase resutls in a loss of welfare

gradual tax reforms if you like it you can keep it abstract one of the key practical challenges facing by tax reforms are their short run welfare consequences in this paper i focus on a consumption based tax reform for which despite long run welfare gains it generates welfare for some groups such as retirees or the working poor falls during transition between steady states using a life cycle model with heterogeneous households i show how to devise a transition path from the current u s federal tax system to a consumption based tax system that improves the welfare of current as well as future generations in a nutshell all households alive at the time of the policy change can choose when they want to switch to the new tax system or whether they want to switch at all i find that implementing a tax reform with this feature improves the welfare of 95 of population in the short run compared to less than a quarter of population in the conventional case with no choice it takes about twenty years for half of the population to pay their taxes under the new tax code

the transition from payroll to consumption receipts with endogenous human capital abstract the transition from payroll to consumption receipts is simulated in a life cycle growth model featuring adult human capital as in other studies savings are higher under the consumption base however unlike those studies much of the additional savings here take human form human capital production increases for all cohorts in or yet to join the labor market as of the tax change the additional human capital production tends to dampen physical capital accumulation when compared with otherwise identical simulations which hold human capital constant the implications for intergenerational incidence are similar to that found in other examinations of the transition to a consumption base

the variable rate of growth effect in the life cycle saving model the rate of growth in real gnp g affects the aggregate saving rate positively in life cycle saving models this rate of growth effect is invariably estimated as the coefficient of g in the saving function we show that other determinants of the saving rate influence the rate of growth effect in other words the rate of growth effect is not constant specifically the real rate of return on financial assets and the population dependency ratio determine the timing of saving over the life cycle and hence alter the rate of growth effect the dependency ratio also has an effect on the saving rate which is independent of g because it together with the foreign saving rate determines the level of saving over the life cycle

altruism intergenerational transfers of time and bequests abstract this paper uses a standard two period overlapping generation model to examine the behavior of an economy where both intergenerational transfers of time and bequests are available while bequests have been examined extensively time transfers have received little or no attention in the literature assuming a log linear utility function and a cobb douglas production function we derive an explicit solution for the dynamics and show that altruistic intergenerational time transfers can take place in presence of a binding non negativity constraint on bequests we also show that with either type of transfers capital is an increasing function of the intergenerational degree of altruism however while with time transfers the labor supply of the young increases with the degree of altruism with bequests it may decrease

welfare effects of capital income taxation under variable and fixed labor supply not every model of economic behavior can allow for variable labor supply when attention is focused on other economic issues the effect on welfare change measurement of assuming labor to be in fixed supply becomes important the traditional view is that allowing labor supply to be variable will reduce the measured benefits of replacing an interest income tax with a payroll or consumption tax owing to the introduction or increase in a static distortion between consumption and leisure however this view ignores two mechanisms by which variable labor supply may actually increase the benefits of relaxing the capital income tax first an interest income tax distorts the intertemporal path of leisure and thus of labor supply second as explained below the interest elasticity of savings may be augmented by changes in the intertemporal labor supply path eliminating the labor supply path distortion and increasing capital accumulation can provide benefits which may potentially exceed the disadvantages of increased static distortion this paper tests which effects dominate by simulation in a life cycle growth model previous papers have not addressed these issues feldstein 3 discusses welfare measurement in a two period model in which an individual supplies labor in the first period and consumes in both periods feldstein s partial equilibrium efficiency measure incorporates the elasticity of labor supply with respect to the interest rate but his single period of labor supply may be misleading summers 8 demonstrates that in multi period models interest rate changes may have a large effect upon the present value of lifetime resources human wealth and consequently consumption that finding when applied to frameworks allowing for leisure consumption implies that both the compensated and uncompensated elasticities of labor supply with respect to the interest rate may be markedly different for multi period than for one period labor supply models summers exploits a multi period life cycle growth model to measure numerically the steady state efficiency gains following an elimination of interest income taxation he assumes labor to be fixed in supply at each moment consequently changes in human wealth cannot affect the leisure profile and the benefits of eliminating intertemporal leisure distortions are not captured summers concludes that steady state consumption and welfare would increase

interest rate smoothing and price level trend stationarity abstract this paper discusses the definition and mechanics of central bank interest rate smoothing under rational expectations a tension arising between interest rate smoothing and macroeconomic stabilization objectives induces non trend stationary price level and money stock behavior the paper thereby helps explain why such nominal non stationarities are widely observed further implications are drawn for base drift distribution of real returns on long term fixed rate nominal debt and operating characteristics of interest rate pegs and policy instruments

the growth in involuntary part time employment of men and women this study presents an economic model that explains the growth in involuntary part time employment the results of three stage least squares estimation show that for men and women similar factors have influenced involuntary part time employment its growth has been encouraged by downturns in the business cycle and expansion of the service sector declines in the percent of the population under 5 years of age and increases in the level of skill among the employed have had the opposite effect

the later you pay the higher the k this paper shows the importance of the age path life cycle timing of any tax for the accumulation of capital in the economy income consumption and wage taxes differ in their age paths as well as their incentive effects this paper studies how the differing age path of each tax affects the capital accumulation of the economy in an empirically calibrated life cycle model we investigate lump sum age taxes and find in every case that the later the person pays tax the higher the k of the economy to analyze the life cycle timing effect of conventional transactions based taxes income consumption and wage we replace each tax with a lump sum age tax that has the identical age path of tax payments over the life cycle we find that the timing effect is quantitatively important and often causes the impact of a tax on capital accumulation to be very different from what would be predicted from the incentive effect

assessing the dynamic efficiency gains of tax reform when human capital is endogenous this paper develops a life cycle growth model with endogenous human capital accumulation and variable leisure which is employed to simulate dynamic equal yield changes from an income tax to a consumption tax although endogenizing human capital investment decisions raises partial equilibrium estimates of the efficiency costs of capital income taxation general equilibrium welfare impacts of unanticipated tax changes are little affected by the inclusion of endogenous human capital this finding cannot be fully explained by the presence of general equilibrium adjustments in factor prices and can be attributed in part to the existence of transitional rigidities in capital stocks copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

fiscal incidence in an overlapping generations model with a fixed asset abstract we analyze a model of overlapping generations with a fixed factor land malleable capital and labor we consider the dynamic effects of various fiscal policies including taxes on rent wages and creation of public debt on capital accumulation land prices and intergenerational welfare minimal assumptions uniqueness and stability imply that a land tax may initially raise land values but the upper bound is less than one half of the tax revenues assuming homothetic utility the ratio between the long run capital responses to a land tax and to a lump sum transfer of equivalent revenue from the young to the old depends solely on the share of labor

comment on kotlikoff shoven and spivak in the absence of perfect annuity markets individual consumers generally undertake precautionary saving to provide resources for their future consumption in the event that they live longer than expected kotlikoff shoven and spivak in this issue hereafter kss have provided us with a well conceived and well executed study of the effects of various annuity arrangements on individual and aggregate saving in the presence of lifetime uncertainty each of these authors has had a long standing interest in this area and their current paper reflects their accumulated expertise their results indicate that a potentially sizable fraction of u s household wealth represents precautionary saving resulting from the absence of perfect annuity markets the strategy of the kss paper is to develop simple models of individual saving behavior on the basis of utility maximization and then to aggregate the behavior of individuals both intraand intertemporally by comparing the results of models that differ in the specification of bequest motives and opportunities for creating annuities kss provide insights about the effects of various annuity arrangements on saving and capital accumulation although the models are all conceptually simple analytic solutions cannot be obtained in many cases therefore kss provide numerical solutions to their models in addition because the models are conceptually

optimal monetary policy and financial stability in a non ricardian economy this paper develops a model with discontinuous asset market participation in which all agents are infinitely lived and non ricardian and where heterogeneity among market participants implies financial wealth effects on aggregate consumption derivation of a welfare based loss function shows that financial stability arises as an additional and independent target besides infl ation and output stability evaluation of optimal policy under discretion and commitment reveals that price stability may no longer be optimal even absent inefficient supply shocks some fluctuations in output and infl ation are optimal as long as they reduce financial instability ignoring the heterogeneity among market participants in this economy may lead monetary policy to induce substantially higher welfare losses

do positional goods inhibit saving evidence from a life cycle experiment abstract we investigate the effect of positional goods goods for which one s consumption relative to others matters on saving based on results from a life cycle consumption saving experiment in a group treatment we allow inter personal comparisons by assigning subjects to groups and displaying rankings based partly on consumption a baseline individual treatment is similar but without the additional information we find more under saving saving less than the optimal amount and lower money earnings for subjects in the group treatment both effects are economically relevant with magnitudes of roughly 6 7 of expected income and 7 8 of average earnings respectively additional analysis shows that the result is driven by those subjects who are not ranked in the top three in their group keeping up with the joneses and males in particular

on barro s theorem of debt neutrality the irrelevance of net wealth the effects of national debt on real economic activity has been a recurring topic in the literature on macroeconomic policy analysis since the time of adam smith the problem is usually stated as follows for a given level of government spending is the economy sensitive to the financing mix between tax and debt historically attention has focused on the question of whether or not individuals perceive government bonds as net wealth the link between wealth and real activity being taken as given the main point of debate is well established the issue of bonds raises private assets by the full value of the bonds the corresponding tax liabilities for interest payments and retirement of the debt extend indefinitely into the future the perception of bonds as net wealth would then appear to depend on the length of the individual s optimization horizon the most recent contribution to this debate was made by robert barro 1974 in which he argued that despite the limitation of finite lives bonds will not be regarded as net wealth in a system characterized by operative intergenerational transfers the essence of his argument is that inclusion of a bequest motive effectively converts a finite horizon into an infinite one in that paper barro acknowledged a potential limitation on his proof of the neutrality result it was only valid for bonds that are redeemed at a known point in the future this limitation was raised again in a subsequent exchange with martin feldstein in which barro 1976 agreed that for a growing economy an increase in steady state per capita debt will generate net wealth if the rate of growth is greater than the interest rate however he argued that such a steadystate growth situation would not be consistent with rational utility maximizing behavior the main theme of this paper is that the literature has focused attention on the wrong question the real effects of national debt are independent of whether or not individuals perceive the debt as net wealth the correct question is whether or not changes in the level of debt force individuals into patterns of intertemporal consumption that they are unable to neutralize by adjustments in their portfolio behavior viewing neutrality in this light leads to some reinterpretation of the conditions under which neutrality is likely to hold my analysis starts where barro and feldstein leave off within the framework of the overlapping generations model with gift and bequest motives i show that steady state equilibrium growth is consistent with a growth rate in excess of the interest rate indeed without specific knowledge of the parameters of the economy there are no a priori grounds on which to expect any particular relationship between the growth and interest rates more importantly so long as it is valid to view the aggregate economy as behaving like a composite individual changes in the steady state level of government debt are neutral regardless of which relationship prevails provided one or the other of the intergenerational transfer motives is operative i will refer to this as the extended neutrality theorem section i presents an analysis of steadystate growth with gift and bequest behavior the steady state growth path is shown to lie above the golden rule solution if the gift

taxes in a life cycle growth model with bequests and inheritances in a recent paper lawrence summers 1981 analyzes alternative taxes in a life cycle growth model this paper extends his analysis to include bequests and inheritances this inclusion is worth undertaking for several reasons first several recent empirical studies have suggested that bequests may account for an important share of the capital stock laurence kotlikoff and summers 1981 second it is important to explore whether the comparison of taxes is significantly affected when a bequest motive is introduced third the treatment of bequests under a consumption tax is controversial the endowment rationale calls for treating a bequest as taxable consumption by the deceased peter mieszkowski 1980 the real wage rationale calls for exempting bequests if such exemption raises the steady state capital intensity and real wage my 1980 article this paper confines itself to positive analysis of steady states transition paths and normative implications are explored elsewhere see my 1982 paper

operative gift and bequest motives the ricardian equivalence theorem which is the proposition that changes in the timing of lump sum taxes have no effect on assumption or capital accumulation depends on the exist of operative altruistic motives for intergenerational transfers these transfers can be bequests from parents to children or gifts from children to parents in order for the ricardian equivalence theorem to hold one of these transfer motives must be operative in the sense that the level of the transfer is not determined by a corner solution resulting from a binding non negativity constraint this paper derives conditions that determine whether the bequest motive will be operative the gift motive will be operative or neither motive will be operative in a model in which consumers are altruistic toward their parents and their children this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the failure of ricardian equivalence under progressive wealth taxation abstract although the ricardian equivalence theorem holds under a linear estate tax schedule it fails to hold under a nonlinear estate tax schedule in a representative consumer economy a temporary lump sum tax increase reduces contemporaneous consumption if different consumers face different marginal estate tax rates because they leave bequests of different sizes a lump sum tax increase redistributes resources from consumers in low marginal estate tax brackets to consumers in high marginal estate tax brackets aggregate consumption may rise fall or remain unchanged these departures from ricardian equivalence hold more generally under any nonlinear tax on saving wealth or income accruing to wealth

property rights and efficiency in olg models with endogenous fertility is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies we propose and analyze a particular market failure that leads to inefficiently low fertility in equilibrium the friction is caused by the lack of ownership of children if parents have no claim on their children s income the private benefit from producing a child can be smaller than the social benefit we analyze an overlapping generations model with fertility choice and parental altruism ownership is modeled as a minimum constraint on transfers from parents to children using the efficiency concepts proposed in golosov jones and tertilt 2007 we find that whenever the transfer floor is binding fertility choices are inefficient second we show that the usual conditions for efficiency are not sufficient in this context third in contrast to settings with exogenous fertility a payg social security system cannot be used to implement efficient allocations to achieve an efficient outcome government transfers need to be tied to fertility choice

dynamic efficiency in the gifts economy abstract in the standard analysis of overlapping generations economies with gifts from children to parents each generation takes the actions of other generations as given the resulting equilibrium is dynamically inefficient in reality however parents realize that children will respond to higher parental saving by reducing gifts for a broad class of gift economies this implicit tax on saving pushes the equilibrium to dynamic efficiency this result reestablishes the potential relevance of the gift model to the us economy renders moot an important part of the ricardian equivalence debate and provides a motivation for a type of social security system

on the limitations of government borrowing a framework for empiricaltesting this paper seeks to distinguish empirically between two views on the limitations of government borrowing according to one view nothing precludes the government from running a permanent budget deficit paying interest due on the growing debt load simply by issuing new debt an alternative perspective holds that creditors would be unwilling to purchase government debt unless the government made a credible commitment to balance its budget in present value terms we show that distinguishing between these possibilities is mathematically equivalent to testing whether a continuing currency inflation might be fueled by speculation alone or is instead driven solely by economic fundamentals empirical tests which have been developed for this economic question lead us to conclude that postwar u s deficits are largely consistent with the proposition that the government budget must be balanced in present value terms this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the present value criterion and environmental taxation the suboptimality of first best decision rules this paper examines the links between environmental taxes and distortionary taxation in a dynamic model of climate change and economic growth under first best conditions labor and capital would remain untaxed and carbon dioxide emissions would be taxed at a rate equal to the present value marginal cost they impose on future society setting the discount rate equal to the marginal productivity of capital under secondbest conditions however this decision rule substantially understates optimal emissions taxes when the resulting revenues are used to provide targeted cuts in distortionary taxes conversely relatively low emissions taxes are economically justified given lump sum revenue recycling

eliminating interest taxation and tariffs the underpinnings for recent canadian policy blanchard s 1985 formulation of the overlapping generations model and the so cial welfare function advocated by calvo and obstfeld 1988 are used to analyse interest taxation and tariffs in a small open economy when the revenue lost from the elimination of these taxes is replaced by raising the tax on labour as in recent canadian experience a low social discount rate is required for the model to support lower interest income taxes while a high discount rate is needed to support the elimination of tariffs we illustrate the empirical importance of this simultaneous need for both a high and a low discount rate eliminer l imposition des revenus d interet et les droits de douane les soubassements de la politique canadienne re cente les auteurs utilisent la formulation blanchard du modele des generations qui se chevauchent et la fonction de bien etre social de calvo et obstfeld pour analyser les effets de l imposition des revenus d interet et des droits de douane dans une petite economie ouverte quand la perte de revenus attribuable a l elimination de ces taxes est comblee par un imp6t sur le travail comme ce fut le cas au canada il faut postuler un taux d escompte social bas pour qu on puisse endosser une politique de reduction de l imposition des revenus d interet alors qu il faut postuler un taux d escompte social eleve pour endosser une politique de reduction des droits de douane les auteurs montrent l importance empirique de cette necessite d avoir un taux d escompte a la fois bas et haut

is college financial aid equitable and efficient nk reed based financial aid is often defended both on grounds of equity and efficiency equity because it provides equality of opportunity and efficiency because it encourages the formation of productive human capital james 1988 however need is now determined in a way that is both inequitable and inefficient an informal survey of my colleagues who do not study financial aid revealed no one who named the financial aid system as a substantial tax on savings however once this interpretation was suggested they quickly revealed their unanimous and disturbing impression that savings are summarily confiscated from parents upon their first child s matriculation at university though exaggerated this impression is not without foundation two families with identical earnings paths pay dramatically different amounts for college if one saves more than the other thus while the financial aid system may contribute to vertical equity since the poor get more aid than the rich its horizontal inequities are substantial moreover the federal rules for financial aid raise significant efficiency concerns 1 they might conceivably distort many household decisions including family size and the spacing of children however this paper will focus upon the most important incentive distorted by present policies the incentive to save because saving leads to receiving less financial aid a family s return to saving is substantially below the social return this may lead to families making inefficient intertemporal choices and correspondingly to an inefficient loss of capital formation

public debt voluntary intergenerational transfers and overlapping generations abstract this paper deals with the characterization of overlapping generations models with voluntary intergenerational transfers when altruism is one sided it is argued that the qualitative conclusions derived about debt neutrality do not depend on the way the intergenerational concern is modelled with operative bequests gifts the steady state interest rate is greater less than the population growth rate regardless of whether individuals have a concern about a representative descendant s ancestor s utility or the total welfare enjoyed by all their children parents when the criterion of total utility of the ancestors is adopted their utility must not be discounted but compounded since otherwise the model has no significant solution although there must be effective discounting of a representative ancestor s utility

a political theory of government debt and deficits in a neo ricardian framework in the presence of different abilities and therefore different bequests some individuals are bequest constrained even in a neo ricardian world such individuals vote for taxes on future generations through the issuance of bonds thereby increasing their current consumption this produces some crowding out of capital reduces wage rates and increases the interest rate as a consequence even unconstrained individuals are no longer indifferent to the size of government debt the paper derives conditions that are conducive to larger debt and deficits when each of the living generations determines current taxes social security benefits and the national debt by majority rule copyright 1989 by american economic association

time consistent taxation in a dynastic family model with human and physical capital and a balanced government budget this paper analyzes optimal time consistent taxation in a dynastic family model with human and physical capital and with a balanced government budget when tax revenue is used for publicly provided consumption or lump sum transfers leisure would be higher than its social optimum pareto optimal taxation requires taxing capital income more heavily than labour income and subsidizing investment at the same rate of the tax also it requires either subsidizing labour at the same rate as a consumption tax or subsidizing consumption at the same rate as a labour income tax and hence it is not a practical guide to policy further a consumption tax or equivalently a uniform income tax with investment subsidies at the same rate can be improved on by taxing capital income more heavily than labour income ce memoire analyse la fiscalite optimale et consistante dans le temps dans un modele de famille dynastique avec capital humain et physique et un budget gouvernemental equilibre quand le revenu fiscal est utilise pour financer la consommation publique ou pour des transferts forfaitaires le niveau de loisir sera plus eleve que l optimum social la fiscalite optimale paretienne exige qu on taxe le revenu du capital plus fortement que celui du travail et qu on subventionne l investissement au meme taux que la taxe elle exige aussi soit qu on subventionne le travail au meme taux que la taxe a la comsommation soit qu on subventionne la consommation au meme taux que l impot sur le revenu du travail et donc ce n est pas un guide pratique pour la politique de plus un regime de taxe sur la consommation ou de maniere equivalente d impot uniforme sur le revenu avec subvention a l investissement au meme taux peut etre ameliore en taxant le revenu du capital plus fortement que celui du travail

public debt and demographic growth in an overlapping generations model abstract the comparative dynamics of changes in the rate of population growth are discussed in an overlapping generations economy where there is public debt the focus is on the effects of such variations on capital accumulation factor returns and welfare of individuals living in steady states

measuring the welfare costs of inflation in a life cycle model abstract in a neoclassical growth model with life cycle households in which money is held to satisfy a cash in advance constraint the optimal steady state inflation rate is absurdly high in excess of 20 lump sum age independent money injections twist and flatten the lifetime profile of utility making this profile look more like the one that would be chosen by a planner the cost of monetary finance of lump sum payments is the distortion introduced to the labor leisure choice

the incidence of visible underemployment evidence for trinidad and tobago this article presents an empirical analysis of the incidence of visible underemployment in trinidad and tobago visible underemployment consists of workers who work less than the normal duration of working hours but are willing and available to work more we find that compared to other groups of the labour force the visibly underemployed tend to be less educated and are more likely to work in the private sector we also find that their revealed behaviour is consistent with their desire for more hours only about 50 per cent of the visibly underemployed are able to find full time employment within three months and little except firm size helps predict who will

endogenous fertility ricardian equivalence and debt management policy abstract the paper develops a model in which dynastic families optimally determine fertility government debt represents a tax on future generations and on childbearing the ricardian equivalence hypothesis does not hold debt is welfare reducing in that it distorts the fertility decision an increase in government debt induces a decline in fertility and an increase in the steady state capital labor ratio if a government inherits an existing stock of debt the first best policy is to eliminate the debt immediately in other situations the optimal debt management policy will not in general entail a total elimination of the debt

macroeconomic effects of factor taxation with endogenous human capital evolution theory and evidence the distortionary effect of factor income taxation has been one of the central issues in public finance theory for example see feldstein 4 boadway 3 homma 6 summers 14 and judd 8 a tax on capital income in contrast to a tax on labor income has been claimed to create an intertemporal distortion that affects the future paths of macro aggregates adversely through the decumulation of physical capital hence it is generally concluded in the aforementioned literature that capital taxation is more distortionary in the long run than labor taxation in this paper we revisit this issue by constructing a dynamic general equilibrium model with infinitely lived perfectly foresighted agents unlike most of the existing literature we develop a growth model in which both physical and human capital are endogenously accumulated 2 within this framework a tax on labor generates a distortionary effect on both human capital evolution and future dynamic paths of output and consumption analogous to the case of capital taxation in contrast to results in previous work labor income taxation in our economy can be more distortionary than capital income taxation even in the long run many studies for years have focused on welfare comparison of factor taxes in most cases calibration or simulation exercises are performed and there has been no empirical research to con

intergenerational altruism with future bias abstract we show that standard preferences of altruistic overlapping generations exhibit future bias which involves preference reversals associated with increasing impatience this underlies a conflict of interest between successive generations we explore the implications of this conflict for intergenerational redistribution when there is a sequence of utilitarian governments representing living generations and choosing policies independently over time we argue that future bias creates incentives to legislate and sustain a pay as you go pension system which every government views as a self enforcing commitment mechanism to increase future old age transfers

are involuntary part time workers indeed involuntary theoretically those classified by the bureau of labor statistics as involuntary part time workers are individuals who would like to work full time but have been unable to obtain full time employment to empirically test the accuracy of that definition the author employs simple probit models of employment preferences and employment opportunities estimated with data from the march 1990 current population survey the results confirm that those classified as involuntary part time workers were indeed employed part time involuntarily furthermore those classified as involuntary part time workers in 1990 were at least 50 more likely to be in the full time labor force in 1991 than were those who were classified as voluntary part time workers in 1990

optimal taxation in a growth model with public consumption and home production in a neoclassical growth model with public consumption we show the following pareto optimal tax rules the government should tax leisure and private consumption at the same rate and subsidize net investment at the same rate it taxes net capital income also it should tax capital income more heavily than labor income in an extension for home production the additional rule is to tax investment for home production at the same rate of the tax on private market consumption these tax and subsidy rates should be constant over time except the initial tax rate on capital income

on debt neutrality in life cycle models abstract a parallelism is established between pure life cycle models and those in which altruism is one sided in the discussion of the public debt neutrality it is argued that when indiduals behave as pure life cyclers the coercive transfers necessary to offset the effects of the debt have the same nature and take place under the same conditions as the voluntary intrafamily bequests and gifts which constitute the usual basis for the ricardian equivalence theorem

public pensions as optimal social contracts abstract a simple overlapping generations model is modified to allow for an externality experienced by the young from consumption by the elderly this sets up a game between generations in which one generation s strategy may be to save too little and rely on gifts from the young e g public assistance for retirement income social security can therefore be viewed as a pareto optimal contract to restore efficient intertemporal allocation a funded public pension plan corresponds to forced saving but is vulnerable in that the next young generation may stop contributing rely on its children for retirement assistance and meanwhile reap the consumption externality from the current elderly s social security benefits this suggests a forced giving or pay as you go type of compulsory pension plan such as exists in most nations which also has the advantage of aiding the initial old generation and therefore generating an immediate consumption externality for the initial young the approach can also be used to explain other aspects of existing social security

pay as you go public pensions with endogenous fertility abstract veall s 1986 model of public pensions is generalized to allow for endogenous fertility we show that gifts to the old which can be viewed as social security contributions are always positive in the steady state an optimal stationary allocation is sustainable if savings are zero and fertility is exogenous however the optimal allocation is in general not sustainable in particular if a government enforces a social security plan setting the pension level at the optimal gifts and individuals optimize under the pension constraint the resulting sustainable outcome is in general different from either the optimal or nash outcome

optimal taxation and optimal tax systems the theory of optimal taxation has for the pas two decades been the reigning normative approach of taxation this paper argues that in its current state optimal tax theory is incomplete as a guide to action concerning many critical issues in tax policy it is incomplete because it has not yet come to terms with taxation as a system of coercively collecting revenues from individuals who will tend to resist the coercive nature of collection taxes implies that the resource cost of implementing a tax system have been and will continue to be a critical determinant of appropriate tax policy the paper first presents the three cornerstone propositions of optimal tax theory and then it discusses the influence of these propositions on recent tax policy developments it concludes by sketching an alternative to optimal taxation called the theory of optimal tax systems which embraces the insights of optimal taxation but also considers the technology of raising taxes and the constraints placed upon tax policy by that technology the optimal tax systems perspective is shown to shed light on the choice of tax instruments the problem of tax evasion and the appropriate tax treatment of capital income this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

tax policy regulated interest rates and saving abstract the paper evaluates tax policy options designed to reduce distortions to savings behavior that occur when administered interest rates are set beneath market equilibrium levels while the removal of controls on interest rates might be the best option political legal or institutional circumstances might well preclude this solution it suggests that consumption or sales taxes can be designed so that in the short term the rate of return to saving can be changed to approximate the market determined interest rate the main advantage of the measure is that it can provide a time to develop appropriate legal and institutional structures for financial deregulation and b an additional policy instrument that allows the burden of adjustment in a stabilization policy setting to be distributed over more than one instrument

sweden s laffer curve taxation and the unobserved economy recent research on the unobserved economy suggests that the phenomenon has important implications for both macroeconomic policy and public finance attention is focused on the public finance implications by developing a simple macromodel from which it is possible to derive a laffer curve the model reveals that the shape and position of the laffer curve depend upon the strength of supply side effects the progressivity of the tax system and the size of the unobserved economy using alternative parameterizations of each of these effects it is possible to obtain rough empirical estimates of the laffer curve for sweden i introduction supply side economics the laffer curve and the unobserved economy are subjects which have captured the interest of economists in their effort to understand and design cures for the growing macroeconomic and public finance malaise which appears to be affecting many of the world s most developed economies high rates of unemployment and inflation combined with slower rates of real growth and ever widening government deficits have focused economists attention on the interrelated issues of macroeconomic stabilization and public finance policy the questions raised by the supply side laffer curve and unobserved economy literature focus on the effects of tax rates on economic performance and the ability of governments to sustain the ambitious social welfare programs established in the past decade while there is much controversy about what the laffer curve looks like and where various economies are on their curves it is generally accepted that the dependence of tax revenues on tax rates is too oversimplified in

savings and wealth in models with altruistic bequests during recent years much attention has been given to the role of bequests in explaining various aspects of economic behavior for example authors have studied the impact of bequests on physical wealth accumulation laurence kotlikoff and lawrence summers 1981 the interest elasticity of savings owen evans 1983 tax reform laurence seidman 1984 and the distribution of wealth alan blinder 1976a more recently economists have begun to distinguish between human and physical bequests gary becker and nigel tomes 1986 acknowledging the presence of bequest in human form is important in analyzing each of the issues mentioned above outlays on children affect the shape of the family s labor supply and expenditure profiles upon which the level of aggregate savings crucially depends if these outlays are interest sensitive substitutes for physical bequests they will also influence the interest elasticity of savings in the area of tax reform the neutrality of the consumption tax depends on the ability of the government to identify human capital bequests from general consumption raymond batina 1987 if this is not possible the portfolio choice of investment in human versus physical capital may be distorted at the margin finally the unequal transmission of wealth across generations may be explained by the lack of physical bequests and the inefficiently low levels of human bequests made by wealthconstrained households becker and tomes 1986 to distinguish clearly the behavior of constrained households from unconstrained households who make sizeable physical bequests both types of bequests must be recognized this paper introduces a model that makes explicit examination of these issues possible it extends lord s 1989 multiperiod model of life cycle savings and adult human capital investment by adding altruistically motivated human and physical bequests 2 the model is calibrated using microeconomic data on earnings time and goods expenditures on children s human capital and physical bequests we then use the model to examine the contribution of bequests to wealth accumulation and the level of savings this topic is the source of an important but yet unresolved debate between franco modigliani 1988 and kotlikoff 1988 kotlikoff maintains that u s wealth accumulation is primarily the consequence of bequests as opposed to life cycle savings for retirement one type of evidence cited by kotlikoff comes from simulation results demonstrating the failure of realistically calibrated life cycle models to generate sufficiently high saving rates and wealth income ratios alan auerbach and kotlikoff 1987 we show however that if a pure life cycle

sex differentials in unemployment rates a case for no concern this paper reevaluates the concept of unemployment in the context of differing labor market and nonmarket opportunities for men and women discussing common fallacies in female to male unemployment rate comparisons and their use as an indicator of labor market equality suggestive empirical evidence is presented for an alternative unemployment rate concept for women for interpreting the procyclical variation in female to male unemployment rate differentials and for decomposing unemployment differences into differences in labor market characteristics and in behavioral coefficients for the two sexes the paper concludes that a large part of the observed unemployment rate differential may be attributed to the definition and methodology used in deriving unemployment statistics rather than to discrimination in productive opportunities

introduction tax policy issues for the 1990s in recent years in the wake of fiscal crisis developing countries have increasingly begun to restructure their tax systems to seek higher revenues or to improve the revenue elasticity and buoyancy of the tax structure chhibber and khalilzadeh shirazi 1988 these reform movements have also aimed to eliminate the disincentive effects of onerous levels of taxation to reduce the economic inefficiencies induced by the distortionary taxation of assets and sectors to protect the poorest of the poor from the tax net and to provide partial relief from the unwelcome effects of inflation this introduction to the following articles on tax policy first gives an overview of tax reform in developing countries it then distills lessons for tax reform from past developing country experiences and reviews selected issues that are expected to dominate tax policy research and discussions in the 1990s the five other articles in this symposium provide an in depth review of applications of tax policy models in developing countries and analysis of tax policy toward foreign direct investment taxation of agricultural land and financial assets and the redistributive impacts of various taxes

social security and savings plans in overlapping generations models abstract this paper examines the impact of social security and saving plans on a simple overlapping generations model with no uncertainty the model is related to and provides a reconciliation of the diamond and samuelson gale models of public debt and public capital savings plans and pay as you go social security are seen to have quite different effects depending on the assumptions governing the growth rates of public debt and capital and it is also shown that the social security program proposed by feldstein is infeasible in the steady state he adopts as a starting point

social security as trade among living generations we model u s social security that is legislated endogeneously by living generations specifically we consider the effects of social security on resource allocation and pareto optimality examining which generations gain from social security and whether some generations lose because saving and transfer decisions are made sequentially in the real world we use an infinite horizon overlapping generations framework in which life cycle saving and transfers to the old are determined by living agents we focus on the case in which agents are altruistic but place sufficiently greater weight on own comsumption than on the consumption of agents in other generations so that starting from a steady state without social security living agents would gain utility if consumption were shifted marginally to them from later generations excerpt

financial innovation price smoothing and monetary policy financial innovation price smoothing and monetary policy i introduction in a monetary economy the volume of nominal transactions fluctuates with the level of economic activity empirical evidence suggests that the supply of nominal transaction assets such as currency and bank deposits also fluctuates with the level of economic activity some researchers have attributed these observations to the phenomenon of money endogeneity 1 one explanation for this endogenous supply response is a systematic monetary policy as described by black 1972 under which the central bank passively adjusts the money supply to accommodate the changes in money demand alternatively king and plosser 1984 and saving 1979 stress the role of the private banking system in producing this endogenous response they argue that exogenous changes in real activity elicit sympathetic changes in the demand for transaction services that may be partially or fully accommodated by the banking system through its supply of inside money in either case this endogenous supply response tends to mitigate the price adjustment that accompanies a real supply shock 2 in the long run however the price level is ultimately determined by the central bank in the market for the nominal quantity that it controls e g currency bank reserves when deposit accounts are subject to reserve requirements or the monetary base 3 this suggests that if the private banking system does not fully accommodate the real shock and if the shock exhibits a well defined persistence then endogenous price adjustments that are fully anticipated may be further damped by a passive supply response by the central bank in addition if price expectations affect real interest rates then current period price level smoothing via a passive monetary policy may also be possible 4 in addition to employing transaction assets currency and checkable bank deposit accounts to meet their transaction requirements agents may purchase non deposit transaction services directly for firms these services include the tools available to the modern corporate cash manager such as lockbox collection systems repurchase agreements and zero balance accounts in the household sector they take the form of atms debit and credit cards and overdraft privilages on checkable accounts among others these non deposit transaction services represent an increasingly important medium of exchange their supply by the banking system is not directly controlled by the central bank and also offers another avenue by which the economy may respond endogenously to fluctuating transaction requirements associated with real shocks thereby further mitigating the price adjustment 5 the production of non deposit transaction services is subject to technology shocks in the form of financial innovations these innovations alter the economy wide demand for currency and checkable bank deposit accounts and prices adjust as with the introduction of new technology into the production of goods financial innovations are not fully adopted immediately due to the fixed costs of adjusting individual cash management practices but are instead assimilated over time this implies that their effects on transaction asset demands persist if the rate of adoption has a forecastable component the central bank can smooth expected prices by passively accommodating these innovations as with aggregate productivity shocks this persistence may also enable the central bank to damp the disturbances to the current period price level that these innovations create through the impact of price expectations on real interest rates this paper examines a non deposit transaction services market in a model economy that is developed in section ii it has the following features transactors can meet their transaction requirements by allocating wealth to currency or to bank deposit accounts that pay a market determined interest rate or by purchasing non deposit transaction services directly at a market determined price

government debt in an overlapping generations model with bequests and gifts in 1974 robert barro argued that if individuals in successive generations were linked by bequests changes in the stock of government debt or in social security programs would have no effect on the steady state capital stock barro assumed that individuals held static expectations and that the size of the population was constant martin feldstein 1974 1977 had concluded that social security would reduce the capital labor ratio in models that did not admit a bequest motive and in his 1976 comment on barro argued that the introduction of government debt or social security into a perfect foresight dynamic growth model with bequests would still reduce the capital labor ratio barro replied that feldstein s criticisms were invalid if the steady state capital labor ratio were smaller than the golden rule level but would be correct if the opposite were true barro did suggest however that the latter possibility with overaccumulation of capital might be ruled out in his model as it was in miguel sidrauski 1967 but he was unable to demonstrate that the required behavior would be consistent with utility maximization by finite lived individuals 1976 p 345 although recent work by willem buiter 1979 jeffrey carmichael 1979 1982 truman bewley 1981 a b and others has helped to elucidate the nature of overlapping generations models with bequests and gifts and the issues in the barro feldstein debate they remain far from clear the purpose of this paper is to shed a little more light on the subject in what follows i contend that some of the authors cited above either have specified the individual s optimization problem in an asymmetric way or have failed to impose necessary conditions for a sensible optimization problem or both there is a natural specification of the barro model 1 that emphasizes the similarity between this model and optimal growth models see for example david cass 1965 peter diamond 1973 here in steady state equilibrium the aftertax interest rate r must equal the rate at which individuals discount the utility of their heirs p r p has become known as the modified golden rule and a meaningful individual optimization problem requires that p exceed n the natural growth rate of the economy my results confirm barro s hunch about his model in a barro model r must exceed n much of the barro feldstein 1976 interchange which assumed that r could have any relation to n is wrong headed barro and feldstein reach different conclusions about the effects of government debt and social security because they assume different individual utility functions also my results contrast sharply with those of buiter and carmichael for example carmichael concluded that with intergenerational transfers from parents to children bequests r must exceed n but with transfers in the opposite direction n must exceed r 1982 pp 205 06 indeed i believe that the buiter carmichael representation of the barro model is logically faulty see section ii in section i i outline an overlapping generations model with gifts and bequests and derive its steady state properties in the next section i discuss the shortand long run effects of introducing government debt into the model and contrast my results with those

the intertemporal allocation of expenditure on non durables services and durables this paper presents estimates of the parameters of a consumption function for u s quarterly seasonally unadjusted data on non durables services and durables the theoretical novelty in the approach we present is in the derivation of the consumption function from an underlying many goods allocation problem applying this model with an appropriate estimator to the data we find i the homogeneity restrictions suggested by theory are not rejected ii there is no evidence of excess sensitivity to income iii there is no evidence to suggest that agents cannot adjust their durable stocks as they would wish and iv the intertemporal substitution elasticity is not well determined

love thy children abstract this paper proves that barro s 1974 debt neutrality proposition whose relevance hinges in an economy with bequest motives on bequests being operative in the economy without public debt is not applicable to a wide class of overlapping generation economies those with a weak bequest motive in particular it is shown that the bequest motive is always too weak and public debt therefore non neutral when non physical assets have a well defined function reducing oversavings in the corresponding economy without bequest motive i e when the non altruistic economy is dynamically inefficient

capital in the payments system capital is required to support the payments system in modern economies with well developed financial markets financial innovations raise the marginal product of capital in this usage this suggests that there are general equilibrium consequences associated with an optimal selection of a payments system that includes barter money and a capital based accounting system in this paper goods are differentiated with respect to the medium of exchange associated with their acquisition which is endogenously determined as a consequence of explicit trading frictions the response of the economy to endowment production and payments system shocks including financial innovations is examined copyright 1992 by the london school of economics and political science

the consumption tax in the presence of altruistic cash and human capital bequests with endogenous fertility decisions abstract we provide an analysis of the consumption tax policy in the presence of cash bequests human capital investments in children and endogenous fertility decisions it is shown that the consumption tax is no longer neutral if the tax rate is constant over the taxpayer s life cycle labor supply is exogenous and the parent expects the offspring to pay the same tax rate if the number of children is chosen optimally by the parent neutrality breaks down because the shadow prices of both bequests and fertility are interlinked it is more expensive to produce a child the larger either bequest is and it is more expensive to make a bequest of either type to each child the larger the number of children produced several examples are provided where imposing the consumption tax induces an increase in the number of children produced and a decrease in net capital formation

real business cycles in this paper we demonstrate how certain very ordinary economic principles lead maximizing individuals to choose consumption production plans that display many of the characteristics commonly associated with business cycles our explanation is entirely consistent with i rational expectations ii complete current information iii stable preferences iv no technological change v no long lived commodities vi no frictions or adjustment costs vii no government viii no money and ix no serial dependence in the stochastic elements of the environment we also provide a completely worked out example of the type of artificial economy we have in mind the time series properties of the example exhibit some major features of observed business cycles although this type of model may not be capable of explaining all of the regularities in actual business cycles we believe that it provides a useful well defined benchmark for assessing the relative importance of factors e g monetary disturbances