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Working Paper
Optimal Unemployment Insurance and International Risk Sharing
Winkler, Fabian; Moyen, Stephane; Stähler, Nikolai (2016-07)
We discuss how cross-country unemployment insurance can be used to improve international risk sharing. We use a two-country business cycle model with incomplete financial markets and frictional labor markets where the unemployment insurance scheme operates across both countries. Cross-country insurance through the unemployment insurance system can be achieved without affecting unemployment outcomes. The Ramsey-optimal policy however prescribes a more countercyclical replacement rate when international risk sharing concerns enter the unemployment insurance trade-off. We calibrate our model to ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2016-054

Working Paper
The Determination of Public Debt under both Aggregate and Idiosyncratic Uncertainty
Chien, YiLi; Wen, Yi (2022-04-28)
We use an analytically tractable, heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets model to show that the Ramsey planner's decision to finance stochastic public expenditures implies a departure from tax smoothing and an endogenous mean-reverting force to support positive debt growth despite the government's precautionary saving motives. Specifically, the government's attempt to balance the competing incentives between its own precautionary saving (tax smoothing) and households' precautionary saving (individual consumption smoothing)---even at the cost of extra tax distortion---implies an endogenous, ...
Working Papers , Paper 2019-038

Working Paper
Time-Inconsistent Optimal Quantity of Debt
Chien, YiLi; Wen, Yi (2021-04-06)
A key property of the Aiyagari-type heterogeneous-agent models is that the equilibrium interest rate of public debt lies below the time discount rate. This fundamental property, however, implies that the Ramsey planner's fiscal policy may be time-inconsistent because the forward-looking planner would have a dominate incentive to issue plenty of debt, such that all households are fully self-insured against idiosyncratic risk whenever the interest rate of government borrowing is lower than the household time discount rate. But such a full self-insurance allocation may be paradoxical because, to ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-037

Report
Practical Optimal Income Taxation
Heathcote, Jonathan; Tsujiyama, Hitoshi (2021-07-30)
We review methods used to numerically compute optimal Mirrleesian tax and transfer schedules in heterogeneous agent economies. We show that the coarseness of the productivity grid, while a technical detail in terms of theory, is critical for delivering quantitative policy prescriptions. Existing methods are reliable only when a very fine grid is used. The problem is acute for computational approaches that use a version of the Diamond-Saez implicit optimal tax formula. If using a very fine grid for productivity is impractical, then optimizing within a flexible parametric class is preferable to ...
Staff Report , Paper 626

Working Paper
Optimal Ramsey Capital Income Taxation —A Reappraisal
Chien, YiLi; Wen, Yi (2017-08-18)
This paper addresses a long-standing problem in the optimal Ramsey capital taxation literature. The tractability of our model enables us to solve the Ramsey problem analytically along the entire transitional path. We show that the conventional wisdom on Ramsey tax policy and its underlying intuition and rationales do not hold in our model and may thus be misrepresented in the literature. We uncover a critical trade off for the Ramsey planner between aggregate allocative efficiency in terms of the modified golden rule and individual allocative efficiency in terms of self-insurance. Facing the ...
Working Papers , Paper 2017-24

Working Paper
On the Distributional Effects of International Tariffs
Hur, Sewon; Carroll, Daniel R. (2020-06-22)
What are the distributional consequences of tariffs? We build a trade model with incomplete asset markets and households that are heterogeneous in their income, wealth, and labor skill. We increase tariffs by 5 percentage points and examine several budget-neutral fiscal policies for redistributing tariff revenue. Without redistribution, tariffs hurt all households, but higher tradables prices disproportionately harm the poor and the ensuing decline in the skill premium disproportionately harms the skilled. With redistribution, lowering the labor income tax leads to lower economic activity but ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-18

Working Paper
The Ramsey Steady-State Conundrum in Heterogeneous-Agent Economies
Chien, YiLi; Wen, Yi (2022-09-16)
In infinite horizon, heterogeneous-agent and incomplete-market models, the existence of an interior Ramsey steady state is often assumed instead of proven. This paper makes two fundamental contributions: (i) We prove that the interior Ramsey steady state assumed by Aiyagari (1995) does not exist in the standard Aiyagari model. Specifically, a steady state featuring the modified golden rule and a positive capital tax is feasible but not optimal. (ii) We design a modified, analytically tractable version of the standard Aiyagari model to unveil the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-009

Working Paper
Optimal Fiscal Policies under Market Failures
Chien, YiLi; Wen, Yi (2020-01-21)
The aggregate capital stock in a nation can be overaccumulated for many different reasons. This paper studies which policy or policy mix is more effective in achieving the socially optimal (golden rule) level of aggregate capital stock in an infinite-horizon heterogeneous-agents incomplete-markets economy where capital is over-accumulated for two distinct reasons: (i) precautionary savings and (ii) production externalities. By solving the Ramsey problem analytically along the entire transitional path, we show that public debt and capital taxation play very distinct roles in dealing with the ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-002

Working Paper
Individual and Aggregate Constrained Efficient Intertemporal Wedges in Dynamic Mirrleesian Economies
Chien, YiLi; Owyang, Michael T.; Chen, Yunmin (2015-12-21)
Assuming a neoclassical production technology, this paper characterizes constrained efficient intertemporal wedges for the macro aggregate as well as the micro individual allocation of dynamic Mirrleesian economies. We first construct ?Pareto-Negishi weights? from the multipliers on a sequence of temporary incentive constraints. For a fairly general stochastic process of idiosyncratic productivity shocks, we show that the evolution of the Pareto-Negishi weight associated with agents? consumption is a nonnegative martingale. This powerful property enables us to deliver three contributions to ...
Working Papers , Paper 2015-43

Working Paper
Intergenerational policy and the measurement of tax incidence
Conesa, Juan Carlos; Garriga, Carlos (2013)
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 ...
Working Papers , Paper 2013-016

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