This paper compares fully-funded (FF) and pay-as-you-go (paygo) pension plans in a Keynesian framework for an economy with overlapping generations and excess capacity. The model addresses both short/medium-run equilibria and steady-states. Income distribution and class conflict, two crucial...

This paper describes how stochastic population forecasts are used to inform and analyze policies related to government spending on the elderly, mainly in the context of the industrialized nations. The paper first presents methods for making probabilistic forecasts of demographic rates,...

The Non-financial (Notional) Defined Contribution (NDC) PAYGO pension scheme is a recent innovation and its generic dimensions have not previously been explored in a coherent context. This paper does this. It derives and analyzes the demographic, economic and distributional properties of NDC....

Many Western countries with an aging population consider reforms of their pay-as-you-go pension systems. In Sweden a new pension system has already been decided and implemented. This paper gives a brief background to the Swedish reforms in the 1990s and explains the structure of the new system.

This paper presents the main features of the macroeconomic model being used at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, which has proven to be a useful tool in tracking the current financial and economic crisis. We investigate the connections of the model to the New Cambridge" approach, and...

Global growth prospects have deteriorated significantly since the beginning of the year, raising the specter of global recession. This paper relies on insights gleaned from previous global recessions to analyze the recent evolution of economic activity and policies and presents plausible...

Macroeconomic crises are common as well as economically, socially and politically costly. Fiscal policy plays an important role in alleviating the costs of the crisis. However, recent experiences suggest that the public finances often are unprepared for a crisis. Deficits and debt levels prior...

This paper evaluates whether the 2011 national stability programs (SPs) of the euro area countries are instrumental in achieving economic stability in the European Monetary Union (EMU). In particular, we analyze how the SPs address the double challenge of public deficits and external imbalances....

Following the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-9, there has been a shift in mainstream economic policy modeling toward "realism," with dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models partly diverging from the representative agent framework, and large-scale, New-Keynesian structural models...

In this paper, the author deals with the question how to make PAYG pension systems financially resistant to fluctuating fertility rates. The author presents two pension schemes that lead to a permanently balanced budget but differ in the mixture of changes in the contribution rates and...