How much can demographic changes account for trends in the U.S. economy? This paper shows that a heterogeneous-agent, overlapping-generations model with historical demographic flows can generate several features of the U.S. economy over the past several decades, including a secular decline in economic growth, a rise in savings relative to GDP, a corresponding decline in real interest rates, and, in part, changes in wealth inequality.
A quantitative study examines how heightened geopolitical risk, coupled with lower oil prices, hampers the economic potential of mega construction projects in Arab Gulf states.
Hany Abdel-Latif, Mahmoud A. El-GamalFebruary 5, 2020
Given that policymakers will eventually need to decide how to resolve the social security program’s projected shortfall, this paper presents a simulation-based approach to evaluating the conventional alternatives of adjustments to benefits or taxes.
Since the progressivity of the sales tax is difficult to directly measure, this paper introduces an indirect approach combining simulated household income with realizations of consumption behavior from survey data.
The impending demise of petrodollar-supported capitalist Islamism, the failures of which begat 21st century terrorist Islamism, incentivizes the Muslim middle class and timocracies to find another outlet for Muslim liberation theology. This amplifies manifold the risks (and potential, but limited, benefits) of “Islamic finance.”
In an economy with heterogeneous firms and heterogeneous consumers, the authors describe a general equilibrium where firm equity is priced by a supply and demand process. With a model robust to arbitrary, nonlinear tax functions, they investigate the efficiency of replacing the current U.S. tax regime with a policy of no corporate taxes and taxation of capital distributions to the household at progressive personal income tax rates.
