Carbon taxation is a widely proposed and in some countries already adopted means to limit anthropogenic climate change. This paper studies carbon taxation using an 18-region, 80- period overlapping generations model. We focus on carbon policy that delivers present and future mankind the highest...

This paper surveys major issues in the theory of tax incidence. These include the incidence of taxes in dynamic as well as static economies and open as well as closed economies. The survey does not represent a comprehensive review of the literature, rather it is offered to the reader as a...

The economics workings of the corporate income tax remain controversial. Harberger's seminal 1962 article viewed the tax as raising the cost of capital used to produce corporate goods. But corporate goods can be and generally are made by non-corporate firms, suggesting that the corporate tax...

We investigate optimal consumption, asset accumulation and portfolio decisions in a realistically calibrated life-cycle model with flexible labor supply. Our framework allows for wage rate uncertainly, variable labor supply, social security benefits and portfolio choice over safe bonds and risky...

Governments are known for procrastinating when it comes to resolving painful policy problems. Whatever the political motives for waiting to decide, procrastination distorts economic decisions relative to what would arise with early policy resolution. In so doing, it engenders excess burden. This...

Will smart machines replace humans like the internal combustion engine replaced horses? If so, can putting people out of work, or at least out of good work, also put the economy out of business? Our model says yes. Under the right conditions, more supply produces, over time, less demand as the...

Anthropogenic climate change produces two conceptually distinct negative economic externalities. The first is an expected path of climate damage. The second, which is this paper's focus, is an expected path of economic risk. To isolate the climate-risk problem, we consider mean-zero, symmetric...

Is deficit finance, explicit or implicit, free when borrowing rates are routinely lower than growth rates? Specifically, can the government make all generations better off by perpetually taking from the young and giving to the old? We study this question in simple closed and open economies and...

This paper develops a 17-region, 3-skill group, overlapping generations, computable general equilibrium model to evaluate the global consequences of automation. Automation, modeled as capital- and high-skill biased technological change, is endogenous with regions adopting new technologies when...

This paper develops a perfect foresight general equilibrium simulation model of life cycle savings that may be used to investigate the potential impact of a wide range of government policies on national savings and economic welfare. The model can provide quantitative answers to a number of...