Search Results
Journal Article
Intertemporal discounting and policy selection
The choice of the intertemporal discount rate affects the measurement of the tax burden of different age cohorts. Small changes in the discount rate affect not only the magnitude of the measured changes, but also the ranking of policies using that metric. The authors illustrate this problem in the context of neutral Social Security reforms. By construction, these policies do not change allocations; hence, they also do not change welfare. However, depending on the choice of the discount rate, one could reach different (and possibly opposite) conclusions regarding the desirability of such ...
Working Paper
Accounting for changes in the homeownership rate
After three decades of being relatively constant, the homeownership rate increased over the period 1994 to 2005 to attain record highs. The objective of this paper is to account for the observed boom in ownership by examining the role played changes in demographic factors and innovations in the mortgage market which lessened downpayment requirements. To measure the aggregate and distributional impact of these factors, we construct a quantitative general equilibrium overlapping generation model with housing. We find that the long-run importance of the introduction of new mortgage products for ...
Journal Article
Predicting the Yield Curve Inversions that Predict Recessions: Part 2
Expectations of housing market conditions should be considered when forecasting recessions.
Journal Article
Measuring (Most of) the Slack in the Labor Market
Compared with previous recessions, the manufacturing sector does not show much slack. The construction sector, on the other hand, is below potential.
Journal Article
Where is the slack in the labor market?
Current slack in the economy may be caused primarily by the construction sector.
Speech
Demographics, redistribution, and optimal inflation
May 30, 2012. "Demographics, Redistribution, and Optimal Inflation," with Carlos Garriga and Christopher J. Waller. Presented by Christopher Waller at the 2012 BOJ-IMES Conference Demographic Changes and Macroeconomic Performance.
Journal Article
Putting Recent Inflation in Historical Context
Prices for many items were depressed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we see the effect in current inflation reports.
Working Paper
Optimal fiscal policy in the design of Social Security reforms
The quantitative macroeconomics literature has documented that in the basic Overlapping Generations model a privatization of the social security system, going from a Pay-As-You-Go to a Fully Funded system, generates large long run welfare gains at the cost of substantial welfare losses for initial generations. We propose an alternative to previous literature. In this paper we maximize over the entire policy space, following the optimal fiscal policy approach, rather than comparing alternative policy paths one to one. That is, policies are chosen as part of the optimal design of a social ...
Journal Article
Household Debt and the Great Recession
In the mid-2000s, household private debt reached a new level 1.2 times larger than personal income? before collapsing during the Great Recession. This paper uses microeconomic data to document the main changes in personal debt and explore the behavior of debt across generations over two periods: before and after the Great Recession. Special emphasis is placed on participation rates by category of debt (the extensive margin), volume borrowed (the intensive margin), and default behavior. Key findings include that between 1999 and 2013 the fraction of individuals with only unsecured (e.g., ...
Working Paper
Intergenerational policy and the measurement of tax incidence
We evaluate the ability of generational accounting to assess the potential welfare implications of policy reforms. In an intergenerational context policy reforms usually have redistributive, efficiency, and general equilibrium implications. Our analysis shows that when the policy reform implies changes in economic efficiency, generational accounts can be misleading not only about the magnitude of welfare changes, but also about the identity of who wins and who losses. In contrast the generational accounts correctly identify welfare changes when the policy reform has only a pure ...