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Journal Article
A primer on the nature of business cycles
Discussions of the effects of monetary and fiscal policy sometimes center on the impact of such policies in ameliorating fluctuations associated with the business cycle. However, though familiar with the term "business cycle," many people are not aware of what it refers to exactly. In this article, Gregory Huffman presents an explanation of the term and provides a detailed illustration of post-World War II U.S. business cycles. He also contrasts the behavior of various U.S. economic time series over the business cycle with similar Canadian statistics and points out some apparent anomalies ...
Journal Article
The dynamic impact of fundamental tax reform part 2 : extensions
In this second of two articles on the economic impact of fundamental tax reform, Gregory Huffman and Evan Koenig extend their earlier framework for analyzing how the adoption of a flat-rate consumption tax would affect the economy over time. They argue that if tax reform is to be successful in stimulating investment and raising long-run living standards, then it is important that ways be found to avoid increasing the rate of labor-income taxation. Increases in labor-income tax rates can undo the positive economic effects of a cut in the rate of capital-income taxation. Conversely, cuts in ...
Journal Article
The dynamic impact of fundamental tax reform part 1: the basic model
The Internal Revenue Service remains unpopular, the U.S. savings rate remains low, and pressure to efficiently raise significant new tax revenues seems certain to grow once the baby boom generation reaches retirement age. Consequently, it is likely that alternatives to the current income tax system will receive substantial political and media attention in coming years. In this first of two articles on the economic impact of fundamental tax reform, Evan Koenig and Gregory Huffman describe a framework for analyzing how the adoption of a flat-rate consumption tax would affect the economy over ...
Working Paper
The dynamics of immigration policy with wealth-heterogeneous immigrants
In this paper we consider a simple intertemporal economy in which immigrants, if admitted, bring heterogeneous amounts of capital. We show that under certain conditions there is a level of immigration which maximizes the economy's capital-labor ratio, and that this level of immigration is the preferred choice of a majority of the economy's citizens. We then characterize, in an overlapping generations setting, the dynamics of capital accumulation and immigration policy, which can include multiple steady state equilibria and a sensitivity of immigration levels to changes in the economy's ...
Working Paper
On the political economy of immigration and income redistribution
In this paper, we study several general equilibrium models in which the agents in an economy must decide on the appropriate level of immigration into the country. Immigration does not enter directly into the native agents' utility functions, and natives have identical preferences over consumption goods. However, natives may be endowed with different amounts of capital, which alone gives rise to alternative levels of desired immigration, We show that the natives' preferences over desired levels of immigration are influenced by the prospect that new immigrants will be voting in the future, ...