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Abstract:
The paper examines the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy, finding substantial evidence in favor. I summarize the U.S. fiscal record from 1792-2003, critically review sustainability conditions and their testable implications, and apply them to U.S. data. I particularly emphasize the ramifications of economic growth. A "growth dividend" has historically covered the entire interest bill on the U.S. debt. Unit root tests on real series, unscaled by GDP, are distorted by the series' severe heteroskedasticity. The most credible evidence in favor of sustainability is the robust positive response of primary surpluses to fluctuations in the debt-GDP ratio.

public debt, sustainability, primary surplus, unit root

Abstract:
Aging societies will have to rely increasingly on private savings to finance retirement. The natural savings vehicles, stocks and bonds, are unfortunately lacking key risk-sharing features that are built into public retirement. Innovative government debt management can address this problem. The optimal policy supplies retirees with securities that share the financial risks of aggregate productivity, asset valuation, and demographic shocks across generations. As the population ages, state-contingent government bonds are a better risk sharing tools than pensions, which become too costly, or taxation, which raises time-consistency problems. Wage-indexed and longevity-indexed bonds in particular yield unambiguous efficiency improvements. To the extent that public pensions remain important, plans with wage-indexed defined benefits seem preferable to defined contributions or price-indexed plans. Capital income taxes and pension trust funds can play a supporting role for risk sharing.

Abstract:
Yes, subject to concerns about Medicare inefficiencies and potentially self-confirming skepticism. The U.S. social security system - broadly defined to include Medicare - faces significant financial problems as the result of an aging population. But demographic change is also likely to raise savings, increase wages, and reduce interest rates, and up to a point, a growing GDP-share of medical spending is an efficient response to an aging population. Thus viability is more a political economy than an economic feasibility issue. To examine the political viability of social security, I focus on intertemporal cost-benefit tradeoffs in a median voter setting. For a variety of assumptions and policy alternatives, I find that social security should retain majority support.

Abstract:
Many governments promise pension and medical benefits to their elderly citizens. As the world is aging, the burden of retiree benefits is becoming painfully obvious. Uncertainty about the future makes planning for retiree benefits even more difficult. Who will suffer or gain financially if the future differs from what we expect? For example, we face tremendous uncertainty about the speed of technical progress, about medical costs, and about trends in fertility and longevity. Government policy determines not only the level of taxes and benefits, but also who bears the risk of unexpected changes. Traditionally, retirement programs largely exempted retirees from sharing risk: by making fixed, unconditional, promises, they necessarily imposed a more-than-proportional risk on younger cohorts and on future generations. We examine the impact of alternative tax, pension, and health care policies on different cohorts, to evaluate how existing policies shift risk across cohorts. We also assess whether there may be conditions under which such policies might be appropriate in the interest of general welfare, and where there may be scope for better policies. The analysis covers the fundamental sources of risk: productivity, fertility, longevity, health, and assets.

Abstract:
We derive median-voter results and study the shape of redistributional taxes when voters elect a candidate who imposes taxes to maximize own utility. Under general conditions, a median-productivity candidate is a Condorcet winner. The imposed tax function is non-linear, may place high marginal rates on very low incomes, and may have an interval of negative marginal rates below the income of the winning candidate. Marginal rates are positive throughout, however, if non-redistributional spending or altruism toward the poor are great enough.

Abstract:
Most states (Vermont is the exception) have a constitutional or statutory limitation restricting their ability to run deficits in the state's general fund. Balanced budget limitations may be either prospective or beginning-of-the-year requirements or retrospective or end-of-the-year requirements. Using budget data from a panel of 47 U.S. states for the period 1970-1991, the analysis finds that states with end-of-the-year (not prospective) balance requirements enforced as constitutional (not statutory) constraints by an independently elected (not politically appointed) state supreme court do have significant positive effects on a state's general fund surplus. The surplus is accumulated through cuts in spending, not through tax increases. It is saved in a state `rainy day' fund in anticipation of future general fund deficits. In contrast, prospective requirements, statutory end-of-the-year requirements, or constitutional end-of-the- year requirements enforced by a politically appointed court do not significantly constrain general fund deficit behavior. Finally, we find little evidence that the constraints `force' deficits into other fiscal accounts.

Abstract:
This paper develops and compares nonnested hypothesis tests for linear regression models with first-order serially correlated errors. It extends the nonnested testing procedures of Pesaran, Fisher and McAleer, and Davidson and MacKinnon, and compares their performance on four conventional models of aggregate investment demand using quarterly U.S. investment data from 1951:1 to 1983:IV. The data and the nonnested hypothesis tests initially indicate that no model is correctly specified, and that the tests are occasionally intransitive in their assessments. Before rejecting these conventional models of investment demand, we go on to investigate the small sample properties of these different nonnested test procedures through a series of monte carlo studies. These investigations demonstrate that when there is significant serial correlation, there are systematic finite sample biases in the nominal size and power of these test statistics. The direction of the bias is toward rejection of the null model, although it varies considerably by the type of test and estimation technique. After revising our critical levels for this finite sample bias, we conclude that the accelerator model of equipment investment cannot be rejected by any of the other alternatives.

Abstract:
As the U.S. population ages, the growing retiree-worker ratio increases the burden of public retirement systems. Is it efficient to maintain a defined benefit social security system? Should PAYGO benefits be reduced and private retirement savings be encouraged? The paper examines these questions in a neoclassical growth model with overlapping generations and demographic uncertainty. In case of shocks to the birth rate, I find that a defined-benefits social security system is more efficient ex-ante than a defined-contribution or privatized system. This is because small cohorts generally enjoy favorable wage and interest rate movements. They are in the labor force when the capital- labor ratio is high and they earn capital income when the capital-labor ratio is low. A defined benefit system helps to offset the effect of these factor price movements by imposing higher taxes on small cohorts. Neither defined-benefits nor its main alternative are fully efficient, however, because they all fail to adjust current retiree benefits in response to anticipated future demographic changes. In case of changes in life-expectancy, the efficient policy response depends on the predictability of deaths at the individual level and on the availability of annuities. Reduced benefits can be efficient if annuities markets are missing and the mortality change is such that accidental bequests decline, but not otherwise.

Abstract:
This paper examines a static voting model for public pensions. The key premise is that families can internalize the cost and benefits of pay-as-you-go programs. A family realizes a net gain if its members collectively receive more in benefits in the current period than they pay in payroll taxes. Abstracting from differences in income, net benefits are positive if the family’s retiree-worker ratio exceeds the national average. If a sufficient fraction of retirees have a suitable number of working-age relatives - not too few and not too many - then a majority of voters belongs to families with above average retiree-worker ratios.

social security, public pensions, voting model

Abstract:
Historically, average real returns on U.S. government debt have been far below the rate of economic growth, allowing the U.S. government to roll over its debt at a rather low cost. At the same time, the rate of return on capital has generally been above the growth rate, suggesting that the U.S. economy is dynamically efficient. The paper shows that the welfare implications of budget deficits in this scenario depend critically on why interest rates have been so low. If the government can offer low returns on its debt because of some unique ability to create default-free claims, persistent primary budget deficits may be unproblematic. But if low interest rates are due to high risk aversion, policies that exploit the low cost of government debt to run frequent budget deficits will impose significant risks on future taxpayers. In essence, safe government debt is safe for the debt holders, but it is very risky for the taxpayers who are implicitly taking a short position in the safe security.