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Summary Anthropogenic climate change produces two conceptually distinct negative economic externalities. The first is an expected path of climate damage. The second, the focus of this paper, is an expected path of economic risk. To isolate the climate-risk problem, we consider three mean-zero, symmetric shocks in our 12-period, overlapping generations model. These shocks impact dirty energy usage (carbon emissions), the relationship between carbon concentration and temperature and the connection between temperature and damages. By construction, our model exhibits a de minimis climate problem absent its shocks. However, due to non-linearities, symmetric shocks deliver negatively skewed impacts, including the potential for climate disasters. As we show, Pareto-improving carbon taxation can dramatically lower climate risk, in general, and disaster risk, in particular. The associated climate-risk tax, which is focused exclusively on limiting climate risk, can be as large as, or larger than, the carbon average-damage tax, which is focused exclusively on limiting average damage.

Carbon taxation is mostly studied in social planner or infinitely lived‐agent models, which obscure carbon taxation's potential to produce a generational win win. This article's large‐scale, dynamic 55‐period, overlapping generations model calculates the carbon tax policy delivering the highest uniform welfare gain to all current and future generations. Our model features coal, oil, and gas, increasing extraction costs, clean energy, technical and demographic change, and Nordhaus' carbon/temperature/damage functions. Assuming high‐end carbon damages, the optimal carbon tax is $70, rising annually at 1.5%. This policy raises all generations' welfare by almost 5%. However, doing so requires major intergenerational redistribution.

We critically review studies by Blanchard (B) and Rachel and Summers (RS). By the standard fiscal-gap measure, the US government is in dire fiscal shape thanks to constantly enlarging its postwar, take-as-you-go Ponzi scheme. Yet B and RS seemingly rationalize its expansion. Their arguments rest on the safe rate being very low. But almost all households face high safe rates--the rates available from pre-paying their loans. We also question modeling assumptions that help drive key B and RS results and reference recent simulation studies, which reach strongly opposite conclusions to B's.

In this paper, we evaluate the effects of a reduction in Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) benefits using seven different quantitative general equilibrium overlapping-generat...

Climate change will impact current and future generations in different regions very differently. This paper develops a large-scale, annually calibrated, multi-region, overlapping generations model of climate change to study its heterogeneous effects across space and time. We model the relationship between carbon emissions and the global average temperature based on the latest climate science. Predicated average global temperature is used to determine, via pattern-scaling, region-specific temperatures and damages. Our main focus is determining the carbon policy that delivers present and future mankind the highest uniform percentage welfare gains – arguably the policy with the highest chance of global adoption. Damages from climate change are positive for all regions apart from Russia and Canada, with India and South Asia Pacific suffering the most. The optimal policy is implemented via a time-varying global carbon tax plus region- and generation-specific net transfers. Uniform welfare improving carbon policy can materially limit global emissions, dramatically shorten the use of fossil fuels, and raise the welfare of all current and future agents by over four percent. Unfortunately, the pursuit of carbon policy by individual regions, even large ones, makes only a limited difference. However, coalitions of regions, particularly ones including China, can materially limit carbon emissions.

This paper develops a 17-region, 3-skill group, overlapping generations, computable general equilibrium model to evaluate the global consequences of automation. Automation, modeled as capital- and high-skill biased technological change, is endogenous with regions adopting new technologies when profitable. Our approach captures and quantifies key macro implications of a range of foundational models of automation. In our baseline scenario, automation has a moderate effect on regional outputs and a small effect on world interest rates. However, it has a major impact on inequality, both wage inequality within regions and per capita GDP inequality across regions. We examine two policy responses to technological change -- mandating use of the advanced technology and providing universal basic income to share gains from automation. The former policy can raise a region's output, but at a welfare cost. The latter policy can transform automation into a win-win for all generations in a region.

Is deficit finance, explicit or implicit, free when borrowing rates are routinely lower than growth rates? Specifically, can the government make all generations better off by perpetually taking from the young and giving to the old? We study this question in simple closed and open economies and show that achieving Pareto gains requires implausible calibrations. Even then, the gains reflect, depending on the economy's openness, improved intergenerational risk-sharing, improved international risk-sharing, and beggaring thy neighbor – not intergenerational redistribution per se. Low government borrowing rates, including borrowing rates running far below growth rates, justify improved risk-sharing between generations and countries. They provide no convincing basis for using deficit finance to redistribute from young and future generations or other countries.

Executive SummaryImplicit government obligations represent the lion’s share of government liabilities in the United States and many other countries. Yet these liabilities are rarely measured, let a...

Determining how to value net government obligations is a long-standing and fundamental question in public finance. Its answer is critical to cost-benefit analysis, the assessment of fiscal sustainability, generational accounting, and other economic issues. This paper posits and simulates a ten-period overlapping generations model with aggregate shocks to price safe and risky government net obligations, including options. Agents can't trade with future generations to hedge the model's productivity and depreciation shocks. Nor can they invest in anything other than one-period bonds and risky capital. Our results are surprising. We find that the pricing of short- as well as long-dated riskless obligations is anchored to the prevailing one-period risk-free return. More surprising, the prices of obligations whose values are proportional to the prevailing wage (e.g., Social Security benefits under a pay-go system with a fixed tax rate) are essentially identical to those of safe obligations, i.e., there is little risk adjustment. This is true notwithstanding our assumption of very large macro shocks. In contrast, government obligations provided in the form of options entail significant risk adjustment. We also show that the value of obligations to unborn generations depends on the nature of the compensating variation. Another finding is that the one-period bond market matters, but less than expected, to valuing obligations. Finally, our model lets us test the ability of arbitrage pricing to get prices right. Surprisingly, with the right specification, it comes close. Although highly stylized, our model suggests the potential of detailed, largescale CGE OLG models to price government obligations as well as non-marketed private securities in the presence of incomplete markets and macro shocks.

Most economists differ not on the causes of the Great Recession, but on their relative importance. They agree, however, that the core problem is human, not market failure. Their widely held assessment helps explain why the Dodd-Frank banking “reform” says so much and does so little. This study re-tries the usual suspects and finds none guilty. Instead, it points to multiple equilibria in banking and the overall economy. Whether it is Cooke and Company in 1873 or Lehman Brothers in 2008, leverage and opacity are the wicked brew that stokes bank runs. And bank runs prompt employer runs – laying off your employees (other firms’ customers) for fear that others are laying off their employees (your customers). The answer is fundamental, not cosmetic banking reform that fixes banking and the economy for good. The answer is replacing leveraged, trust-me banking with fully transparent, 100 percent equity-financed mutual fund banking. This reform, called Limited Purpose Banking, handles all aspects of finance, including lending, risk allocation and the payment system. It would permanently end the leveraging of taxpayers by banks and bring a permanent end to financial crises.

The U.S. has a plethora of federal and state tax and benefit programs, each with its own work incentives and disincentives. This paper uses the Fiscal Analyzer (TFA) to assess how these policies, in unison, impact work incentives. TFA is a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing program that incorporates household borrowing constraints and all major federal and state fiscal policies. We use TFA in conjunction with the 2016 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances to calculate Americans’ remaining lifetime marginal net tax rates. Our findings are striking. One in four low-wage workers face marginal net tax rates above 70 percent, effectively locking them into poverty. Over half face remaining lifetime marginal net tax rates above 45 percent. The richest 1 percent also face a high median lifetime marginal tax rate – roughly 50 percent. Double taxation matters. The overall median lifetime marginal net tax rate is 43.2 percent compared with an overall current-year marginal net tax rate of 37.6 percent. We also find remarkable dispersion in both lifetime and current-year marginal net tax rates, particularly among the poor, and major differences in marginal and average net taxation across states, providing typical households a large incentive to relocate to another state. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Executive SummaryMany, if not most, baby boomers appear at risk of suffering a major decline in their living standard in retirement. With federal and state government finances far too encumbered to significantly raise Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, boomers must look to their own devices to rescue their retirements, namely, working harder and longer. However, the incentive of boomers to earn more is significantly limited by a plethora of explicit federal and state taxes and implicit taxes arising from the loss of federal and state benefits as one earns more. Of particular concern is Medicaid and Social Security’s complex earnings test and clawback of disability benefits. This study measures the work disincentives confronting those age 50 to 79 from the entire array of explicit and implicit fiscal work disincentives. Specifically, the paper runs older respondents in the Federal Reserve’s 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances through The Fiscal Analyzer—a software tool designed, in part, to cal...

This chapter provides an overview of the social security and welfare systems, indicate their accomplishments, point out serious problems in their structuring and financing, and suggest ideas for reform. It deals with a discussion of the general objectives of the income transfer system as well as of the problems inherent in meeting those objectives. The welfare system, for instance, redistributes substantially more to “single mothers with children” than to poor married couples with children. The negative income tax differs from the existing welfare system in its reliance on income as the sole sorting criterion. Realistic welfare reform proposals must then accept categorical coverage as a political reality. In the welfare area, the government supervises the goods consumers purchase with food stamps, Medicaid, and subsidized housing. The welfare system presents equally appalling cases of unequal treatment of equals. Welfare caseworkers have considerable latitude in determining work-related expenses that may be deducted from earnings in the welfare benefit calculation.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) significantly changed federal income taxation, including limiting SALT (state and local property, income, and sales taxes) deductibility to $10,000. We esti...

This paper projects China's national savings through 2040 based on China's national account data, demographic data, and data on rural and urban life-cycle income and consumption. Our baseline projections show that China's national saving in 2040 will be 16 times the current national saving. The annual growth rate of wealth will decline from 16.3 percent in 2012 to 9.5 percent in 2040. Lowering the growth rate of wealth accumulation to the current rate of return to wealth increases consumption through 2040; lowering the growth rate of wealth further may increase consumption more in the short run, but less in the long run.

Most economists differ, not on the causes of the Great Recession, but on their relative importance. They concur, though, on the basic problem, namely human, not market failure. This study applies the evidence, some new, some old, to re-try the usual suspects. It finds none guilty. Instead, it identifies broadly defined multiple equilibrium, mediated by opacity, false rumors, and panic, as the real culprit. There are many models of bank runs. But each can trigger firing runs – firing someone else’s customers for fear that others are firing your customers. Firing runs, in turn, exacerbate bank runs, producing a vicious cycle. This cycle can be manipulated by those who benefit from economic distress (short sellers). If the banking system, not the banking players is the problem, the solution surely lies in fundamental banking reform. This paper concludes by pointing out that a reform that shifted to 100 percent, equity-financed mutual-fund banking with government-organized, real-time asset verification and disclosure could preclude financial runs and their ability to induce firing runs.

Bank failures are generally liquidity as well as solvency events. Whether it is households running on banks or banks running on banks, defunding episodes are full of drama. This theater has, arguably, lured economists into placing liquidity at the epicenter of financial collapse. But loss of liquidity describes how banks fail. Bad news about banks explains why they fail. This paper models banking crises as triggered by news that the degree (share) of banking malfeasance is likely to be particularly high. The malfeasance share follows a state-dependent Markov process. When this period’s share is high, agents rationally raise their probability that next period’s share will be high as well. Whether or not this proves true, agents invest less in banks, reducing intermediation and output. Deposit insurance prevents such defunding and stabilizes the economy. But it sustains bad banking, lowering welfare. Private monitoring helps, but is no panacea. It partially limits banking malfeasance. But it does so inefficiently as households needlessly replicate each others’ costly information acquisition. Moreover, if private audits become public, private monitoring breaks down due to free-riding. Government real-time disclosure of banking malfeasant mitigates, if not eliminates, this public goods problem leading to potentially large gains in both non-stolen output and welfare.

The US government has spent decades taxing current generations while also writing them huge IOUs for future benefits. This paper models the effect on everyday Americans of closing the true $210 trillion fiscal gap with an immediate and permanent 57 percent increase in all federal taxes or with a delayed increase of 69 percent. We examine the impact either method of smoothly closing the fiscal gap would have on five stylized households in three different cohorts. Raising the federal tax rate on all households, at all age and resource levels, increases each family's lifetime tax rate and decreases lifetime spending. The results show that delaying the tax increase lowers the burden on those now alive, particularly the elderly. Meanwhile, the burden on those left to pick up the tab grows larger with each passing year of congressional and presidential inaction.

The theoretical literature on generational risk assumes that this risk is large and that the government can effectively share it. To assess these assumptions, this paper calibrates and simulates 80-period, 40-period, and 20-period overlapping generations (OLG) life-cycle models with aggregate productivity shocks. Previous solution methods could not handle large-scale OLG models such as ours due to the well-known curse of dimensionality. The prior state of the art uses sparse-grid methods to handle 10 to 30 periods depending on the model's realism. Other methods used to solve large-scale, multi- period life-cycle models rely on either local approximations or summary statistics of state variables. We employ and extend a recent algorithm by Judd, Maliar, and Maliar (2009, 2011), which restricts the state space to the model's ergodic set. This limits the required computation and effectively banishes the dimensionality curse in models like ours. We find that intrinsic generational risk is quite small, that government policies can produce generational risk, and that bond markets can help share generational risk. We also show that a bond market can mitigate risk-inducing government policy. Our simulations produce very small equity premia for three reasons. First, there is relatively little intrinsic generational risk. Second, aggregate shocks hit both the young and the old in similar ways. And third, artificially inducing risk between the young and the old via government policy elicits more net supply as well as more net demand for bonds, by the young and the old respectively, leaving the risk premium essentially unchanged. Our results hold even in the presence of rare disasters, very high risk aversion, persistent productivity shocks, and stochastic depreciation. They echo other findings in the literature suggesting that macroeconomic fluctuations are too small to have major microeconomic consequences.

Will incomes of low and high skilled workers continue to diverge? Yes, according to our paper’s dynamic, six-good, five-region – U.S., Europe, N.E. Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong), China, and India, general equilibrium, life-cycle model. The model, which endogenizes specialization and features incomplete factor-price equalization, predicts a near doubling of the ratio of high- to low-skilled wages over the century. Increasing wage inequality arises from a traditional source – a rising worldwide relative supply of unskilled labor, reflecting Chinese and Indian productivity catchup. But growing wage inequality can be greatly mitigated if China and India dramatically improve the skill mix of successive cohorts via improved education.

The economics workings of the corporate income tax remain controversial. Harberger's seminal 1962 article viewed the tax as raising the cost of capital used to produce corporate goods. But corporate goods can be and generally are made by non-corporate firms, suggesting that the corporate tax penalizes the act of incorporating, not the decision of already incorporated firms to hire capital. This paper makes this point with a simple, capital-less model featuring entrepreneurs, with risky production technologies, deciding whether or not to go public. Doing so means selling shares, which is costly and triggers the firm's classification as a corporation subject to income taxation. But going public has an upside. It permits entrepreneurs to diversify their assets. In discouraging incorporation, the corporate tax taxes business risk-sharing, keeping more entrepreneurs private and, thus, exposed to more risk. The added risk experienced by these entrepreneurs limits their demands for labor whose costs must be paid come what may. And less demand for labor spells a lower wage. Thus, the corporate tax is, as a general rule, borne, in part, by labor. But it is borne primarily by high-skilled entrepreneurs who decide to remain incorporated despite the attendant tax liability. While it hurts high-skilled entrepreneurs and low-skilled workers, the corporate tax benefits middle-skilled entrepreneurs who remain private, but are able, thanks to the tax, to hire labor at a lower cost. The reduction in labor costs has one other key effect. It induces low-skilled entrepreneurs to set up their own risky businesses rather than work for others. This represents a second channel through which the corporate tax induces excessive business.

Purpose Some discussions of physician specialty choice imply that indebted medical students avoid choosing primary care because education debt repayment seems economically unfeasible. The authors analyzed whether a physician earning a typical primary care salary can repay the current median level of education debt and meet standard household expenses without incurring additional debt. Method In 2010-2011, the authors used comprehensive financial planning software to model the annual finances for a fictional physician's household to compare the impact of various debt levels, repayment plans, and living expenses across three specialties. To accurately develop this spending model, they used published data from federal and local agencies, real estate sources, and national organizations. Results Despite growing debt levels, the authors found that physicians in all specialties can repay the current level of education debt without incurring more debt. However, some scenarios, typically those with higher borrowing levels, required trade-offs and compromises. For example, extended repayment plans require large increases in the total amount of interest repaid and the number of repayment years required, and the use of a federal loan forgiveness/repayment program requires a service obligation such as working at a nonprofit or practicing in a medically underserved area. Conclusions A primary care career remains financially viable for medical school graduates with median levels of education debt. Graduates pursuing primary care with higher debt levels need to consider additional strategies to support repayment such as extended repayment terms, use of a federal loan forgiveness/repayment program, or not living in the highest-cost areas.

The 2015 Paris Accord is meant to control our planet's rising temperature. But it may be doing the opposite in gradually, rather than immediately reducing CO2 emissions. The Accord effectively tells dirty-energy producers to "use it or lose it." This may be accelerating their extraction and burning of fossil fuels and, thereby, be permanently raising temperatures. Our paper uses a simple OLG model to illustrate this long-noted Green Paradox. Its framework treats climate damage as a negative externality imposed by today's generations on tomorrow's – an externality that is, in part, irreversible and can tip the climate to permanently higher temperatures. In our model, delaying abatement can lead to larger changes in climate than doing nothing, reducing welfare for all generations. In contrast, immediate policy action can raise welfare for all generations. Finally we question the standard use of infinitely-lived, single-agent models, which assume, unrealistically, intergenerational altruism in determining optimal abatement policy. Their prescriptions can differ, potentially dramatically, from those needed to correct the negative climate externality today's generations are imposing on tomorrow's.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

This study measures inequality and fiscal progressivity. It differs from prior such analyses by measuring inequality based on remaining lifetime spending rather than particular resources, like wealth and current income, that only partially determine lifetime spending, and by considering inequality and progressivity within generations. To estimate the distribution of remaining lifetime spending, we run the 2016 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances (after imputing missing data from other surveys) through The Fiscal Analyzer (TFA), a life-cycle consumption-smoothing program that incorporates remaining life-time resources, borrowing constraints and all major federal and state tax and transfer programs. We find that inequality in wealth and income dramatically overstate inequality in remaining lifetime spending. For example, the richest 1 percent of forty year olds, where resources are measured as the sum of human plus non-human wealth, have 34.1 percent of the cohort’s total non-human wealth, but account for only 14.5 percent of the cohort’s total remaining lifetime spending. The poorest quintile of forty year olds own just 0.6 percent of the cohort’s wealth, but account for 7.3 percent of its remaining lifetime spending. We also find that within-cohort inequality differs considerably from inequality across the entire population, regardless of age, and that, for particular age cohorts, current-year net tax rates substantially understate the degree of progressivity. Finally, as we illustrate by for the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the progressivity of tax reform may be significantly misstated using conventional current-year analysis.

National saving rates differ enormously across developed countries. But these differences obscure a common trend, namely a dramatic decline over time. France and Italy, for example, saved over 23% and 19% of national income in 1970, but only 9% and 4% respectively in 2008. Japan saved almost 33% in 1970, but only 7% in 2008. And the U.S. saved around 11% in 1970, but only 1% in 2008. What explains these international and intertemporal differences? Is it demographics, government spending, productivity growth or preferences? For the U.S. and France, whose saving behavior we study, preferences appear to be an important factor. American and French societies are placing increasing weight on the welfare of those currently alive, particularly contemporaneous older generations. Government spending also appears to be one of the reasons why France is saving at much lower rates. These conclusions emerge from estimating two models in which society makes consumption and labor supply decisions in light of uncertainty over future government spending, productivity, and social preferences. The two models differ in terms of the nature of preference uncertainty and the extent to which current society can control future societies' spending and labor supply decisions.

Social Security needs to be fundamentally reformed without undermining its legitimate mission — forcing people to save and insure and providing forms of social insurance that the private market would either not provide or provide poorly. Although the system has done great good, it is incomprehensible, inefficient, inequitable, and, most important, insolvent. This paper lays out a simple, modern version of Social Security that Bismarck would surely support. My proposed Personal Security System is fully funded, transparent, efficient, fair, and progressive. It features personal accounts that are collectively invested by the government (not Wall Street) at zero cost to workers.

This paper surveys the economic wreckage created by Wall Street's decision to manufacture and sell trillions of dollars of financial securities, which we now call toxic. And we call them toxic, not because they were risky, but because they were fraudulent. Rather than address the fundamental reasons the financial sector engages in malfeasance, the US government has been busy issuing its own fundamentally fraudulent securities, namely guarantees to support large segments of the financial sector were there to be major runs on the banks and other financial institutions. Fulfilling such guarantees would require printing trillions upon trillions of dollars and causing hyperinflation. The potential for such runs is very large, indeed, thanks to Uncle Sam's perilous fiscal finances. Achieving fiscal balance and financial security will require fundamental reform of America's retirement, tax, Social Security, and financial systems. These reforms, as outlined here, may strike some as radical. But what is truly radical is maintaining the policies now in place. (JEL codes: H2, H5, and G2) Copyright The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

The world's leading economies, both developed and developing, are engaged in an ever-changing economic symbiosis that is governed in large part by demographics and technological change, but also by pension, healthcare, and other fiscal policies. This interconnected economic evolution--what economists call general equilibrium growth--holds important implications for inequality across and within generations. This paper presents such a general equilibrium model. It features six goods, five regions, three skill groups, and 91 overlapping generations, each making life-cycle consumption and labour-supply decisions. The model pays special attention to the evolution of the Chinese and Indian economies. Thanks to their rapid technological advance and vast populations, these nations will play an ever more dominant role in determining the world's supplies of capital and labour, particularly unskilled labour. The good news for the developed world is that China and India will supply it with major amounts of capital over time, thanks to their high saving rates. The bad news is that these economies are also likely to bring much more unskilled relative to skilled labour into the market, which will, over time, dramatically reduce the relative wages of unskilled workers in the US, Europe, and Japan. This relative increase in the world supply of unskilled workers reflects, in large part, the simple fact that China and India are gradually bringing each of their skill groups up to Western standards, but have relatively more unskilled labour in their work forces. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

This paper has considered an issue which only a few considered in the literature on harmonization of regional fiscal policies. The lack of attention paid to location distortions may reflect the sense that few individuals actually move to different states or countries because of differences in fiscal policies. This study confirms this view for the U.S.; for the U.S. economy as a whole the distortion of location choice appears to be small. However, for the four percent or so of Americans induced, by regional differences in fiscal policy, to relocate, the location distortion may range from .5 to 1.5 percent of the present value of their lifetime consumption – which is not small. In addition, the results suggest that location distortions rise geometrically with the size of regional fiscal differences.