The U.S. and other western economies are experiencing dramatic changes in growth and age structure of their populations. Fluctuations in birth rates are the most important determinants of these changes in the post war period. This paper examines the dynamic effects of baby "booms" and...

Demographic changes, such as those anticipated in most OECD countries, have many economics effects that impinge on a country's fiscal viability. Evaluation of the effects of associated changes in capital-labor ratios and the welfare and behavior of different generations requires the use of a...

Using the TAXSIM model for the period 1962-95, we consider the federal tax system's impact as an automatic stabilizer. Despite the many changes in the tax system, there has been relatively little change in its role as an automatic stabilizer. We estimate that individual federal taxes offset...

The U.S. has a plethora of federal and state tax and benefit programs, each with its own work incentives and disincentives. This paper uses the Fiscal Analyzer (TFA) to assess how these policies, in unison, impact work incentives. TFA is a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing program that...

Recent advances in testing for the validity of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) focus on the time series properties of real exchange rates in panel frameworks. One weakness of such tests, however, is that they fail to inform the researcher as to which cross-section units are stationary. As a...

In this paper we introduce the general setting of a multivariate time series autoregressive model with stochastic time-varying coefficients and time-varying conditional variance of the error process. This allows modeling VAR dynamics for non-stationary times series and estimation of time varying...

Following Giraitis, Kapetanios, and Yates (2014b), this paper uses kernel methods to estimate a seven variable time-varying (TV) vector autoregressive (VAR) model on the data set constructed by Smets and Wouters (2007). We apply an indirect inference method to map from this TV VAR to time...