Search Results
Working Paper
Generational accounting: the case of Italy
An examination of the generational imbalance in current Italian fiscal policy, showing that unless dramatic steps are taken soon, future generations' net tax bill will be four or more times the amount that today's newborns are slated to pay.
Working Paper
The mismatch between life insurance holdings and financial vulnerabilities: evidence from the Health and Retirement Survey
Using data on older workers from the 1992 Health and Retirement Survey, along with an elaborate life-cycle planning model, the authors quantify the effect of each individual's death on the financial status of his or her survivors and the degree to which life insurance holdings moderate these consequences. The average change in living standard that would result from a spouse's death is small, both in absolute terms and relative to the decline that would occur without insurance. However, this average obscures a startling mismatch between insurance holdings and underlying vulnerabilities. For ...
Working Paper
Social Security's treatment of postwar Americans: how bad can it get?
The authors consider Social Security?s treatment of postwar Americans under alternative tax increases and benefit cuts that would help bring the system?s finances into present-value balance. The alternatives include immediate tax increases, eliminating the ceiling on taxable payroll, immediate and sustained benefit cuts, raising the system?s normal retirement age, switching from wage to price indexing in calculating benefits, and limiting the price indexing of benefits. The choices made among these and other alternatives have important consequences for which postwar generations (and which of ...
Working Paper
Gains from trade under uncertainty, once again
Working Paper
Social security and Medicare policy from the perspective of generational accounting
An application of the generational accounting method of fiscal policy analysis to projected spending paths for Social Security and Medicare suggesting that, under realistic assumptions for these programs, future generations as well as current young Americans could bear a significantly larger share of the burden of government spending than previously thought.
Discussion Paper
Risk-sharing, altruism, and the factor structure of consumption
We consider four models of consumption that differ with respect to efficient risk-sharing and altruism. They range from complete markets with altruism to family risk-sharing. We use a matched sample of parents and independent children available from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to discriminate between the four models. Our testing procedure is designed to deal with the set of observed independent children being endogenously selected. The combined hypothesis of complete markets and altruism can be decisively rejected, while we fail to reject altruism and hence family risk-sharing for a ...
Working Paper
Is Our Fiscal System Discouraging Marriage? A New Look at the Marriage Tax
We develop, apply, and test a new measure of the marriage tax: the reduction in future spending from getting married. Our measure is a comprehensive, actuarial (expected) present value. It incorporates all major and most minor US tax and benefit programs, weighing the present value of additional net taxes from marrying along each marital survivor path by the path’s probability. And it assumes clone marriage—marrying oneself—to ensure the living-standard loss from marrying is unaffected by spousal choice. We calculate our marriage tax for young respondents using the Survey of Consumer ...
Journal Article
The 1995 budget and health care reform: a generational perspective
A presentation of the baseline generational accounts for 1992, estimating both the effect of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 and the further impact of the Clinton administration's health reform proposal.
Conference Paper
It's High Time to Privatize: Panel Discussion
Journal Article
Assessing fundamental tax reform
A look at how some basic tax reform proposals stack up against four, sometimes competing, requirements laid out by President Clinton in a December 1997 speech: Is the proposal fiscally responsible? Will it be good for the economy? Will it lead to a simpler tax system? And finally, is it fair to all Americans?