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Working Paper
The Macro Effects of Climate Policy Uncertainty
Uncertainty surrounding if and when the U.S. government will implement a federal climate policy introduces risk into the decision to invest in capital used in conjunction with fossil fuels. To quantify the macroeconomic impacts of this climate policy risk, we develop a dynamic, general equilibrium model that incorporates beliefs about future climate policy. We find that climate policy risk reduces carbon emissions by causing the capital stock to shrink and become relatively cleaner. Our results reveal, however, that a carbon tax could achieve the same reduction in emissions at less than half ...
Working Paper
The effect of endogenous human capital accumulation on optimal taxation
This paper considers the impact of endogenous human capital accumulation on optimal tax policy in a life cycle model. Including endogenous human capital accumulation, either through learning-by-doing or learning-or-doing, is analytically shown to create a motive for the government to use age-dependent labor income taxes. If the government cannot condition taxes on age, then it is optimal to use a tax on capital in order to mimic such taxes. Quantitatively, introducing learning-by-doing or learning-or-doing increases the optimal tax on capital by forty or four percent, respectively. Overall, ...
Journal Article
Decomposing inflation
As U.S. core inflation measures have declined in recent years, analysts have renewed their efforts to understand inflation dynamics. A common approach to this issue is to make inferences about how price changes of major components affect the aggregate inflation rate. This article takes a more rigorous approach, calculating and plotting the precise contributions of major consumer expenditure categories to core inflation measures over time. ; This technique has distinct advantages. It highlights the underlying trends in inflation, enabling analysts to make more informed inferences about the ...
Discussion Paper
The Green Dividend Dilemma: Carbon Dividends Versus Double-Dividends
By raising the price of carbon-emitting energy sources, a carbon tax would flexibly incentivize households and businesses to reduce fossil fuel consumption and substitute towards cleaner energy sources. A carbon tax would also generate a substantial stream of government revenue. This raises an important question – how should this revenue be used? In this note, we summarize findings from our recent research (Fried et al. (2018)) that examine this question.
Working Paper
Taxing Capital? The Importance of How Human Capital is Accumulated
This paper considers the impact of how human capital is accumulated on optimal capital tax policy in a life cycle model. In particular, it compares the optimal capital tax when human capital is accumulated exogenously, endogenously through learning-by-doing, and endogenously through learning-or-doing. Previous work demonstrates that in a simple two generation life cycle model with exogenous human capital accumulation, if the utility function is separable and homothetic in each consumption and labor, then the government has no motive to condition taxes on age or tax capital. In contrast, this ...
Working Paper
A Historical Welfare Analysis of Social Security: Whom Did the Program Benefit?
A well-established result in the literature is that Social Security tends to reduce steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. In a computational life cycle model that simulates the Great Depression and the enactment of Social Security, this paper quantifies the welfare effects of the program's enactment on the cohorts of agents who experienced it. In contrast to the standard steady state results, we find that the adoption of the original Social Security tended ...
Working Paper
An extensive look at taxes: how does endogenous retirement affect optimal taxation?
This paper considers the impact on optimal tax policy of including endogenously determined retirement in a life cycle model. Allowing individuals to determine when they retire causes the optimal tax on capital to increase by 75% because of two implicit changes in the aggregate labor supply elasticity. First, including endogenous retirement causes an increase in the overall aggregate labor supply elasticity since agents can change their labor supply on both the intensive and extensive margins. In response, the government limits the distortions from the tax policy by lowering the tax on labor ...
Working Paper
Reconciling micro and macro estimates of the Frisch labor supply elasticity
There are large differences between the microeconometeric estimates of the Frisch labor supply elasticity (0-0.5) and the values used by macroeconomists to calibrate general equilibrium models (2-4). The microeconometric estimates of the Frisch are typically estimated by regressing changes in hours on changes in wages conditional on the individual being a married male head of household, working some minimum number of hours and being of prime working age. In contrast macroeconomic calibration values are typically set such that fluctuations in a general equilibrium model match the observed ...
Working Paper
How Well Did Social Security Mitigate the Effects of the Great Recession?
This paper quantifies the welfare implications of the U.S. Social Security program during the Great Recession. We find that the average welfare losses due to the Great Recession for agents alive at the time of the shock are notably smaller in an economy with Social Security relative to an economy without a Social Security program. Moreover, Social Security is particularly effective at mitigating the welfare losses for agents who are poorer, less productive, or older at the time of the shock. Importantly, in addition to mitigating the welfare losses for these potentially more vulnerable ...
Working Paper
The Distributional Effects of a Carbon Tax on Current and Future Generations
This paper examines the non-environmental welfare effects of introducing a revenue- neutral carbon tax policy. Using a life cycle model, we find that the welfare effects of the policy differ substantially for agents who are alive when the policy is enacted compared to those who are born into the new steady state with the carbon tax in place. Consistent with previous studies, we demonstrate that, for those born in the new steady state, the welfare costs are always lower when the carbon tax revenue is used to reduce an existing distortionary tax as opposed to being returned in the form of ...