The purpose of this paper is to provide a progress report on the issue of the implications of optimal tax theory and recent econometric evidence for tax policy. Toward this end, Section 2 provides a brief and often heuristic summary of the major results of optimal tax theory. Section 3 reports...

After exploring both the crucial role of the interest elasticity of the saving rate in the analysis of a wide variety of issues in economic - particularly tax - policy and reasons why previous studies of the effect of interest rates on consumption and saving have biased the estimated elasticity...

Section 1 presents a preliminary attempt at clarifying the ways in which taxes affect human capital accumulation. Section 2 outlines a simple general equilibrium model with two capital goods - physical and human â€" and the saving corresponding to each, to begin to deal with these issues....

One of the most striking features of the postwar U.S. economy has been the rapid decrease in the labor force participation of the elderly at a time when the health of this group has been improving. In spite of this, previous research, based on retrospective interviews with the retired...

The Traditional View (TV) of large deficits and debt is they have large economic costs, save in a recession and early recovery, because they crowd out investment and lower future income, and taken to extremes, can cause inflation and even a financial crisis. The TV has been challenged, most...

Alternative measures of saving are developed and compared to the traditional NIPA estimates. Various data sources and estimation methodologies all conclude that adjustments for net saving in durables, government capital, capital gains and losses, and revaluations are substantial. For example,...

This paper introduces extensions of the National Income Accounts to include a consistent treatment of consumer durables and government capital in the measurement of consumption and income, and explicitly tests alternative propositions concerning the effects of government financial policy on real...