By continuing to implement contractionary monetary policy as the pandemic-era business cycle matures, the Federal Reserve risks overshooting a soft landing, writes nonresident fellow Jorge Barro.
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.
As the Biden administration confronts a difficult economic environment, experts at the Center for Public Finance highlight key policy levers Congress might use to stabilize the U.S. fiscal situation and propose three main dimensions on which fiscal policy proposals should be evaluated to ensure transparency.
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.
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.
