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...

Deficit finance is free when the growth rate routinely exceeds the government's borrowing rate. Or so many people say. This note presents three counterexamples. Each features a simple OLG economy with a zero growth rate and a negative government borrowing rate. None provides a basis for taking...

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...

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...

The post-COVID price surge has reignited interest in inflation's impact on American households. Even if anticipated and with full market adjustments, inflation affects households through its interaction with the fiscal system, which is the focus of this paper. Inflation affects households...

Which region(s) will come to dominate the world economy? This paper develops the Global Gaidar Model (GGM), a 17-region, 2-skills, 100-period OLG model, to address this and other questions. The model is carefully calibrated to 2017 UN demographic and IMF fiscal data. Productivity growth and its...

We develop, apply, and test a new measure of the marriage tax - the reduction in future spending from getting married - using SCF and ACS data. Our measure incorporates all major and most minor U.S. tax and benefit programs. And it assumes clone marriage - marrying oneself - to ensure the...

Americans are notoriously bad savers. Large numbers are reaching old age too poor to finance retirements that could last longer than they worked. This study uses the 2018 American Community Survey to impute retirement ages for 2019 Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF) respondents. Next, we run the...

Fiscal policy in the U.S. and other countries renders intertemporal budgets non-differentiable, nonconvex, and discontinuous. Consequently, assessing work and saving responses to policy requires global optimization. This paper develops the Global Life-Cycle Optimizer (GLO), a stochastic...

This paper questions the widely accepted view that deficits have real effects in the life cycle model. Standard analyses of deficits within life cycle models treat the government as a dictatorial entity that can effect any intergenerational redistribution it desires. In contrast, this paper...