The explosion in the 21st century of terrorist activities by Islamic radicals in the United States, Europe and Asia requires reforming the institutions for domestic counterterrorism (CT) and new international relations among individual national CT organizations. This paper discusses the...

Increasing the rate of saving is an important priority for many emerging market countries. This paper focuses on Mexico and discusses a variety of policies through which the government of Mexico could stimulate a higher rate of saving. These ideas are building blocks rather than an overall plan....

The nature and content of research and teaching in public economics have changed enormously during the past three decades. The field is more theoretically rigorous, more empirical, more focused on real policy issues, and more concerned with government spending as well as with taxation. For me,...

Productivity in the United States has been growing faster in the past seven years than it did in the previous quarter century. U.S. productivity growth accelerated while that in Europe declined. This paper asks why U.S. productivity growth has been faster than in the past and than in Europe. An...

This paper is an analytic comment on two chapters of the Economic Report of the President for 2006. Chapter One deals with the economy in 2005 and the outlook for the future. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of the expansion in 2005 but not an explanation of why the expansion occurred...

This paper traces the changing role of the Council of Economic Advisers. In the 50 years since its creation, the CEA's focus has shifted from the design of policies to achieve full employment to one of advising on the much-enlarged spending and tax activities of the federal government. The CEA's...

Social-security retirement benefits distort the saving decisions of workers who are rational enough to save for their future. Since the implicit rate of return in an unfunded social-security program is less than the marginal product of capital, the resulting decline in saving causes a welfare...

This paper uses a Treasury Department panel of more than 4,000 taxpayers to estimate the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates based on a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform. The analysis emphasizes that the response...

The evidence presented in this paper supports the basic theoretical presumption that state and local governments cannot redistribute income. Since individuals can avoid unfavorable taxes by migrating to jurisdictions that offer more favorable tax conditions, a relatively unfavorable tax will...