This paper analyzes the effects on present consumption of budget deficits under different assumptions regarding demographics. In the first part, birth and death rates are deterministic; and in the second part, birth rates are assumed to be stochastic. In the case of a deterministic population...

The ability of discretionary fiscal policy to affect economic activity following shocks depends on how private agents react. This paper re-investigates the extent of possible offsetting private saving behaviour to fiscal policy changes. The results suggest that the private saving offset is...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. GROWTH, SAVING, AND INVESTMENT IN AN EMERGING MARKET ECONOMY -- III. THE MEASUREMENT OF PRIVATE SAVING -- IV. CROSS-COUNTRY EVIDENCE -- V. TIME-SERIES EVIDENCE FOR MEXICO -- VI. MEXICO'S SAVING: WHICH WAY DOES THE CAUSALITY GO? -- VII. CONCLUSIONS --...

Tax or debt financing of a given rate of government expenditures would, according to the now well-known Ricardian Equivalence proposition, have equivalent effects on aggregate demand. Among the reasons for a deviation from the equivalence is the possibility that the government and the private...

Evans (1991) has demonstrated that Blanchard’s (1985) finite-horizon model obeys approximate Ricardian equivalence. We show that this result is determined largely by an unrealistic assumption that labor income grows monotonically over a consumer’s entire lifetime. Introducing more realistic...

This paper examines the relative efficacy of cuts in government spending on goods and services and increases in taxation as tools for augmenting national saving--an issue related to Ricardian equivalence. The theoretical analysis shows little presumption in favor of spending cuts for this...

This paper examines the macroeconomic implications of life-cycle and dynastic saving behavior for closed and small, open economies. Using an extended version of Blanchard’s overlapping agents model, the analytical framework nests these two competing views, treating agents as either dynastic...