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.
Despite its massive geological endowment and receiving what could be considered the largest windfall in its economic history, Venezuela entered 2020 in the middle of an unprecedented economic crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic and turbulence in oil markets represent the latest in a string of problems that expose the country’s vulnerability.
To avoid the resource curse, nonresident fellow Todd Moss proposes a direct cash dividend to drive macroeconomic benefit, alleviate poverty and create incentives that drive demand for transparency and sound management.
This working paper is part of a series titled “The Role of Foreign Direct Investment in Resource-Rich Regions.”
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.
Public finance fellow Thomas Hogan analyzes the relationship between bank lending and the Federal Reserve's policy of paying interest on excess reserves (IOER).
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.
At least 164 papers have defined a "patent thicket" since the first mention of the term in 1988. Authors are frequently inconsistent in their definitions and overall there is evidence of a growing confusion concerning patent thickets. Our analysis largely resolves this confusion.
