We argue that the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds provides little or no subsidy to capital investment by communities. Instead, the tax exemption simply provides arbitrage opportunities to high and low tax bracket individuals while leaving individuals in intermediate tax brackets essentially...

Around the turn of the century, Southern blacks lost the right to vote and discrimination against them by local government officials intensified. This paper argues that, in the case of the de jure segregated public schools attended by black children, the ability of Southern blacks to ''vote with...

Despite widespread concern and discussion, no consensus exists concerning the causes of the "infrastructure crisis." We investigate several models of the determination of local public capital expenditures. Using Euler equation methods, we find that the hypothesis that construction spending is...

Do state and local governments smooth their consumption spending across years, or is their spending driven mainly by contemporaneous changes in resources? We design a test to determine which view of state and local spending is more consistent with the data. We find that state and local spending...

We examine individuals' self-reported willingness to exchange part of their Social Security inflation-indexed annuity benefit for an immediate lump-sum payment, using an experimental module in the 2004 Health and Retirement Study. Our first finding is that nearly three out of five respondents...

Starting in 2009, the German state of Saxony distributed sports club membership vouchers among all 33,000 third graders in the state. The policy’s objective was to encourage them to develop a long-term habit of exercising. In 2018, we carried out a large register-based survey among several...

This paper studies the effect that changing demographic patterns have had on the household saving rate in China. We undertake a quantitative investigation using an overlapping generations (OLG) model where agents live for 85 years. Consumers begin to exercise decision making when they are 18....

The share of the population aged 60 and over is projected to increase in nearly every country in the world during 2005-2050. Population ageing will tend to lower both labor-force participation and savings rates, thereby raising concerns about a future slowing of economic growth. Our calculations...

We develop a consistent and comprehensive theoretical framework for assessing whether economic growth is compatible with sustaining well-being over time. The framework focuses on whether a comprehensive measure of wealth - one that accounts for natural capital and human capital as well as...

This paper investigates how increases in the level of maximum earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax have affected Social Security benefits and taxes. The analysis uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to ask how different the present value of own benefits and taxes would...