Policymaking for posterity involves current decisions with distant consequences. Contrary to conventional prescriptions, we conclude that the greater wealth of future generations may strengthen the case for preserving environmental amenities; lower discount rates should be applied to the far...

Perhaps the most important change of the last century was the great expansion of life itself -- in the US alone, life expectancy increased from 48 to 78 years. Recent economic estimates confirm this claim, finding that the economic value of the gain in longevity was on par with the value of...

This note describes an algorithm for the solution of rational expectations models with saddlepoint stability properties. The algorithm is based on the method of multiple shooting, which is widely used to solve mathematically similar problems in the physical sciences. Potential applications to...

This paper summarizes my recent research directed at the development of an asset price approach to the analysis of capital income taxation. While asset prices play a crucial role in many macroeconomic models, they have been subordinate in most previous efforts to study the effects of capital...

This paper tests several competing hypotheses about the economic effects of dividend taxation. It employs British data on security returns, dividend payout rates, and corporate investment, because unlike the United States, Britain has experienced several major dividend tax reforms in the last...

Although recent research suggests that intergenerational transfers play an important role in aggregate capital accumulation, our understanding of bequest motives remains incomplete. We develop a simple model ofquot;exchange-motivatedquot; bequests, in which a testator influences the decisions...

Urban economists understand housing prices with a spatial equilibrium approach that assumes people must be indifferent across locations. Since the spatial no arbitrage condition is inherently imprecise, other economists have turned to different no arbitrage conditions, such as the prediction...

When members of deliberating groups speak with one another, their predeliberation tendencies often become exacerbated as their views become more extreme. The resulting phenomenon -- group polarization -- has been observed in many settings, and it bears on the actions of juries, administrative...

When combined with the logical notion of partially interpreted functions, many nonparametric results in econometrics and statistics can be understood as statements about semi-algebraic sets. Tarski's quantifier elimination (QE) theorem therefore guarantees that a universal algorithm exists for...