The recent ceiling of U.S. federal debt and the European sovereign debt crises raised once again the interest upon balanced government budgets. The Ricardian Equivalence proposition appears as an attractive alternative for policy makers, since postponing taxes to be paid once growth is restored...

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 paper provides a comprehensive survey of the theories of consumption functions. The Keynesian consumption function is examined in more detail under a condition of a small open economy. The paper explains the variety of consumption expenditures in the Czech Republic between 1993 - 2001. In...

This paper aims to test the validity of the Ricardian proposition for the Spanish economy from three different approaches: a) by testing its theoretical implications on the stability of national saving and the relationship between fiscal and current account balances, b) by carrying a number of...

This paper shows that the Ricardian Equivalence proposition can continue to hold when expectations are not rational and are instead formed using adaptive learning rules. In temporary equilibrium, with given expectations, Ricardian Equivalence holds under the standard conditions for its validity...

This paper shows that the Ricardian Equivalence proposition can continue to hold when expectations are not rational and are instead formed using adaptive learning rules. In temporary equilibrium, with given expectations, Ricardian Equivalence holds under the standard conditions for its validity...

This paper estimates an Euler equation for per capita consumption to investigate whether social security increases consumption ceteris paribus in seventeen countries. Following the seminal work of Martin Feldstein, the literature has estimated consumption functions to address this question....

This paper develops an overlapping agents model with age-specific mortality rates. The analytical framework also nests Blanchard's (1985, Journal of Political Economy 82, 1095–1117) "perpetual youth" model as a special, though perhaps not realistic, case. With age specific mortality...

The efficacy of fiscal policy in Japan in the last decade has been a subject of considerable dispute, and the coincidence of mounting deficits and continued stagnation has led some to conclude that fiscal policy was ineffective. This paper finds ample support for the opposite conclusion:...

I undertake a quantitative investigation into the short run effects of changes in the timing of taxes for a model economy in which heterogeneous households trade only one asset and face a borrowing constraint. This asset market structure implies that the consumption of low wealth households is...