It is well recognised that the issue of the social rate of discount applies only to the gains from public investment that accrues to the public sector. When it comes to measurement, however, there is a problem: public investment in infrastructure and the like do not usually yield direct...

The U.S. fiscal imbalance — the excess of what we expect to spend, including repayment of our debt, over what government expects to receive in revenue — is large and growing. And with politicians proposing large new expenditures, little is being done to rectify the country's fiscal health....

This paper examines the question of whether the U.S. State Department’s budget should be cut, and if so, by how much. If its budget increased by the same percentage as the increase in GDP since 2000, it would be 43.3 percent smaller than it was in 2016

We use discounted cash flow analysis to measure a country's fiscal capacity. Crucially, the discount rate applied to projected cash flows includes a GDP risk premium. We apply our valuation method to the CBO's projections for the U.S. federal government's deficit between 2022 and 2051 and debt...

Americans are notoriously bad savers. Large numbers are reaching old age too poor to finance retirements that could last longer than they worked. This study uses the 2018 American Community Survey to impute retirement ages for 2019 Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF) respondents. Next, we run the...

The present study reports the findings of a survey conducted by the World Values Survey scientists in the United States on the question of whether governments should tax the rich and subsidize the poor. The sample size of 2166 consisted of individuals from all parts of the United States. A...

Political economists interested in discerning the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in...

The German current account balance has moved from surplus to deßcit in the course of unificalion. A theorelical model for the current account, encompassing the elaslicities, the monetary, and the absorptions approach, is set up and lested for Germany and the United States, using cointegration...

In this paper, we quantitatively analyze to what extent a benevolent government should issue debt in a model where households are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks, insurance markets are missing and borrowing is restricted. In this environment, issuing government bonds facilitates...

This paper examines the use of buybacks in Treasury cash and debt management. We review the mechanics and results of the buyback operations conducted in 2000-01, during a time of budget surpluses, and assess the prospective use of buybacks in the absence of a surplus. Possible future...