Spending elasticities measure the reaction of different government spending components to the business cycle. They are important inputs for fiscal forecasts, and they are particularly relevant in the context of European Union (EU) fiscal rules, as elasticity estimates enter the estimation of...

We extend "economic equivalence" results, like the Ricardian equivalence proposition, to the political sphere where policy is chosen sequentially. We derive conditions under which a policy regime (summarizing admissible policy choices in every period) and a state are "politico-economically...

For more than 25 years, the Social Security Trust Fund has been projected to run out of money in 2033 (give or take a few years), potentially causing benefits to be severely reduced in the absence of corrective legislative action. Today (February 2024), projections are made by the Social...

We extend "economic equivalence" results, like the Ricardian equivalence proposition, to the political sphere where policy is chosen sequentially. We derive conditions under which a policy regime (summarizing admissible policy choices in every period) and a state are "politico-economically...

In this Article, I critically examine the assumption that the Social Security system faces a financing crisis and that the government can avert the crisis only by acting now to cut benefits or to raise taxes. The best conclusion we can draw from the current evidence is that the system is not...

This paper analyzes a social security policy with public debt in an overlapping generations growth model. In particular, the paper considers a situation in which population aging causes a heavy burden of social security payments where public debt is issued by the government to finance the...

Financial intermediaries issue the majority of liquid securities, and nonfinancial firms have become net savers, holding intermediaries' debt as cash. This paper shows that intermediaries' liquidity creation stimulates growth -- firms hold their debt for unhedgeable investment needs -- but also...

This paper examines the role of fiscal policy in the long run. We show that (i) dynamic inefficiency may be empirically relevant in a modified Diamond OLG model with imperfect competition, (ii) fiscal policy may be needed to avoid inefficiency (if investment adjusts passively to saving) and...

We show that (i) dynamic inefficiency may be empirically relevant in a modified Diamond model with imperfect competition, (ii) if fiscal policy is used to avoid inefficiency and maintain an optimal capital intensity, the required debt ratio will be inversely related to the growth rate, and (iii)...

This paper examines the role of fiscal policy in the long run. We show that (i) dynamic inefficiency in a standard OLG model generates aggregate demand problems in a Keynesian setting, (ii) fiscal policy can be used to achieve full-employment growth, (iii) the required debt ratio is inversely...