A well‐established result in the literature is that Social Security reduces steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical quantitative effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. In a computational life cycle...

We examine the effect of federal and subnational fiscal policy on aggregate demand in the U.S. by introducing the fiscal effect (FE) measure. FE can be decomposed into three components. Discretionary FE quantifies the effect of discretionary or legislated policy changes on aggregate demand....

This paper quantifies the welfare implications of the U.S. Social Security program during the Great Recession. We find that the average welfare losses due to the Great Recession for agents alive at the time of the shock are notably smaller in an economy with Social Security relative to an...