Laurence J. Kotlikoff

Philip Moeller

Paul Solman

Helps those nearing retirement make the best decisions about their Social Security benefits by detailing techniques and options like “file and suspend” and “start stop start” to maximize their benefit income for a variety of different life situations.

The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security

Get What's Yours

"In 2016, Social Security rules changed radically. Do you know how - and how these changes might apply to you? Americans have left literally billions of Social Security dollars on the table - benefits we have earned, are eligible to take, but simply aren't aware of. Fully revised and carefully updated in light of the new law, Get What's Yours is the indispensable guide to collecting the maximum Social Security benefits possible."--Page [4] of cover.

Get What's Yours - Revised & Updated

Scott Burns

Guides the reader through America's generational imbalance and proposes policies to avoid the demographic overload and fiscal crisis that America will be faced with in the future as a result of this imbalance.

What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future

The Coming Generational Storm

saving ourselves, our kids, and our economy

The clash of generations

Fumio Hayashi

Joseph G. Altonji

We use the 1988 PSID to study the effects of income and wealth on transfers of money and time between individuals and their parents as well as the effects of incomes of other relatives on these flows. We relate the relative incomes of parents and parents in-law to transfer amounts given and received by married couples. We also study how the relative incomes of divorced parents influence transfers. We find that money transfers tend to reduce inequality in household incomes and that time transfers are only weakly related to income differences. Richer siblings give more to parents and receive less. Among parents and parents in-law the richer set of parents is more likely to give money and less likely to receive money. The same is true of divorced parents. In contrast to the implications of simple exchange models of transfers, there is little evidence in the cross section or in the analysis using siblings that parental income or wealth raises time transfers from children or that time transfers are exchanged for money transfers. In the cross section and among siblings, the strong negative relationship between time transfers and distance from parents is not associated with a strong negative relationship between distance and money transfers. We discuss the implications of our results for alternative models of transfers.

The Effects of Income and Wealth on Time and Money Transfers Between Parents and Children

David A. Wise

Retirement Benefits and Labor Force Participation

The Wage Carrot and the Pension Stick

Ariel Pakes

In neoclassical models of consumption choice under earnings uncertainty changes in consumption programs from one period to the next are determined by new information received about future earnings over the period. This proposition suggests testing the neoclassical model by ascertaining whether new earnings information explains consumption choice through time. It also suggests that actual consumption choices imbed extractable information about the extent and time resolution of earnings uncertainty. This paper derives a fairly general theoretical relationship between properly defined innnovations in consumption (noise) and revisions in expectations of lifetime earnings (news). It also clarifies the relationship between testing for the theoretical determinants of consumption and standard Euler tests that focus on theoretical nondeterminants of consumption. The chief prediction of the paper's theoretical results, that noise exactly equals news, is tested using aggregate time series data on consumption and earnings. We find that new earnings information explains only a very small fraction of the variance of aggregate consumption innovations. On the other hand, the extent of suboptimal consumption choice appears to be of little economic significance.

Looking for the News in the Noise, Additional Stochastic Implications of Optimal Consumption Choice

Kent Smetters

Jan Walliser

Notwithstanding the rosy short-term fiscal scenarios being advanced in Washington, the demographic transition presents the United States with a very serious fiscal crisis. In 30 years there will be twice the number of elderly, but only 15 percent more workers to help pay Social Security and Medicare benefits. A realistic reading of the government demographic projections suggests a two thirds increase in payroll tax rates over the next three to five decades. However, these forecasts ignore macroeconomic feedback effects. In particular, they ignore the possibility that the nation will have more capital per worker as the number of elderly wealth-holders rises relative to the number of young workers. More capital per worker would mean higher worker productivity, higher real wages, and the lower return to capital that worries Wall Street. It would also mean a bigger payroll tax base and a smaller rise in tax rates. On the other hand, a higher payroll tax will leave workers with less after-tax income out of which to save and, therefore, fewer retirement assets than would otherwise be the case. Thus capital deepening is not a foregone conclusion. This study develops a dynamic general equilibrium life-cycle simulation model to study these conflicting forces. The model is the first of its kind to admit realistic patterns of fertility and lifespan extension. It also features heterogeneity, within as well as across generations, and, thus, can be used to study both intra- and intergenerational equity. Unfortunately, our baseline demographic simulation, which assumes the continuation of current social security policy, shows deteriorating macroeconomic conditions that will exacerbate, rather than mitigate, our fiscal problems. Real wages per effective unit of labor fall 4 percent over the next 30 years and 10 percent over the century. For Wall Street, this bad news about real wages is good news about the real return on capital, which rises 100 basis points by 2030 and 300 basis points by 2100. The model's gradual capital shallowing reflects the concomitant major rise in tax rates. In 2030, payroll tax rates and average income-tax rates applied to wages are 77 and 9 percent higher, respectively, than in 2000. Together, these tax hikes raise.

Finding a Way Out of America's Demographic Dilemma

Assaf Razin

This paper examines the bequest\gift behavior of altruistic parents who do not know their children's abilities and cannot observe their children's work effort. Parents are likely to respond to this information problem by making larger bequests to higher earning children and by using their transfers implicitly either to tax at the margin low earning children or to subsidize at the margin high earning children. These implicit tax rates may be quite large, despite the fact that total transfers are small. The paper suggests that labor supply studies should take into account potential implicit family taxation as wall as official government taxation. In addition, the fact that the family may play an implicit role in taxation means that there may be less need for the government to play such a role.

Bequests as an Implicit Optimal Tax Structure and the Possibility that Altruistic Bequests are Not Equalizing

Making Bequests Without Spoiling Children

This paper discusses conceptual problems of distinguishing "expenditure" policy from "tax" policy and "deficit" policy. The paper argues that each of these concepts is ill-defined and does not provide a useful basis for examining the government" underlying fiscal policies. The fundamentals of fiscal policy involve changes in marginal incentives, inframarginal intra- and intergenerational redistribution, and direct government consumption. The paper reviews some of the effects of these fundamental policy choices on economic growth

The Economic Effects of Government Expenditures

This paper discusses recent neoclassical analyses of taxation and savings. Contrary to the popular view that fiscal policy has highly ambiguous impacts on savings, neoclassical models admit a host of policies with clear and potentially quite powerful affects on the accumulation of wealth. The paper considers four fundamental types of fiscal policies and compares their quantitative affect on savings. The essential elements of these policies involve inter- and intragenerational redistribution, marginal and intra-marginal taxation, and the level of government consumption. Conventional accounting measures of "taxes", "spending", and "deficits" provide, at best, little guide to changes in underlying fiscal instruments and, at worst, precisely opposite indicators of the direction of such changes. Indeed, the continued use of and concern with conventional fiscal measures is symptomatic of wide spread fiscal illusion. These points are developed within the context of certainty models. The paper also considers the role of fiscal policy in both mitigating and exacerbating economic risks facing the private sector. Since precaution is a major motivation for saving, governments can greatly influence wealth accumulation either by using fiscal policy to pool private risks or by making fiscal policy itself highly uncertain

A Neoclassical Perspective

Taxation and Savings

This paper studies the macroeconomic and efficiency effects of privatizing social security. It does so by simulating alternative privatization schemes using the Auerbach-Kotlikoff Dynamic Life-Cycle Model. The simulations indicate three things. First, privatizing social security can generate very major long-run increases in output and living standards. Second the long-run gains from privatization are larger if privatization redistributes resources from initial to future generations, the pure efficiency gains from privatization are also substantial. Efficiency gains refers to the welfare improvement available to future generations after existing generations have been fully compensated for their losses from privatization. The precise size of the efficiency gain depends on the existing tax structure, the linkage between benefits and taxes under the existing social security system, and the method chosen to finance benefits during the transition. Third, at least in the long run, privatizing social security is likely to be progressive in that it improves the well-being of the lifetime poor relative to that of the lifetime rich.

Simulating the Privatization of Social Security in General Equilibrium

Robert W. Rosenthal

This article demonstrates that Ricardian Equivalence does not necessarily hold in models with altruistic transfers once one takes into account the strategic behavior of recipients as well as donors. To influence the final allocation of consumption in altruistic settings, potential recipients can threaten to refuse as well as accept transfers. We apply the Extended Nash Bargaining Solution to the problem of an altruistic parent and a possibly altruistic child. The parent and child first choose a threat point noncooperatively; this threat point then influences the final allocation of consumption through the standard Nash Bargaining Solution, While the potential recipient can refuse transfers from the potential donor, he cannot refuse transfers from the government. When the government redistributes between the parent and child, it changes their endowments and the equilibrium threats, and thus the final allocation of consumption. The feature of the cooperative model presented here that leads to the failure of Ricardian Equivalence may be characteristic of a wider class of cooperative and noncooperative altruism models. This feature is that noninterior strategic postures underlie interior transfer behavior and that these non- interior strategic postures are altered by government redistribution.

A Strategic Altruism Model in which Ricardian Equivalence Does Not Hold

Alan J. Auerbach

Jagadeesh Gokhale

A New Approach for Understanding the Effects of Fiscal Policy on Saving

Generational Accounting

Examines evidence which points to a deterioration in the standard of living of American children relative to adults, particularly the current elderly. With generational accounting, it compares the lifetime net tax burdens (taxes paid less transfers received) of different generations.

The Equity of Social Services Provided to Children and Senior Citizens

Notwithstanding its widespread use as a measure of fiscal policy, the government deficit is not a well-defined concept from the perspective of neoclassical macro economics. From the neoclassical perspective the deficit is an arbitrary accounting construct whose value depends on how the government chooses to label its receipts and payments. This paper demonstrates the arbitrary nature of government deficits. The argument that the deficit is not well-defined is first framed in a simple certainty model with nondistortionary policies, and then in settings with uncertain policy, distortionary policy, and liquidity constraints. As an alternative to economically arbitrary deficits, the paper indicates that the "Fiscal Balance Rule" is one norm for measuring whether current policy will place a larger or smaller burden on future generations than it does on current generations. The Fiscal Balance Rule is based on the economy's intertemporal budget constraint and appears to underlie actual attempts to run tight fiscal policy. It says take in net present value from each new young generation an amount equal to the flow of government consumption less interest on the difference between a) the value of the economy's capital stock and b) the present value difference between the future consumption and future labor earnings of existing older generations. While the rule is a mouth-full, one can use existing data to check whether it is being obeyed and, therefore, whether future generations are likely to be treated better or worse than current generations

Looking for an Economically Meaningful Way to Assess Fiscal Policy

From Deficit Delusion to the Fiscal Balance Rule

Jane Gravelle

An important deficiency in Harberger's (1962) model of corporate income taxation is its inability to consider both corporate and noncorporate production of the same good. This precludes analysis of within-industry substitution of noncorporate for corporate production in response to the tax. Such within-industry substitution has potentially major implications for both the excess burden and incidence of the corporate tax. In Gravelle and Kotlikoff (1988) we present a new model of the corporation income tax. The model has two key characteristics. First, corporate and noncorporate firms produce (with identical production functions) each of the model's goods both before and after corporate taxation is imposed, and second, the decision of entrepreneurs to establish unincorporated business is endogenous. Compared with the Harberger model, the new model predicts a very much larger excess burden from corporate income taxation. The incidence of the corporate tax can also differ dramatically in the two models. Several commentators on our approach suggested that while corporate and noncorporate fins produce goods that are close substitutes, they are not necessarily identical goods. Others questioned the extent to which our results hinged on the endogeneity of entrepreneurship. This paper is a response to those comments. It presents a Harberger-type model (with no entrepreneurs), but one in which each industry/sector contains corporate and noncorporate fins (with identical production functions) which produce goods that are close substitutes in demand. As in our earlier model, the scope for considerable within-industry substitution of noncorporate for corporate capital leads to a very much larger excess burden than that in the Harberger model. For example, using Harberger's original 195? data and assuming unitary substitution elasticities in production and in inter-sector demand, but substitution elasticities of 30 in intra-sector demand, the excess burden of the corporate income tax in the current model is 107 percent of tax revenue. This figure is quite close to the 123 percent figure reported in Cravelle and Kotlikoff (1988) for the case of unitary substitution elasticities in production and inter-industry demand. Both numbers are considerably larger than the 8 percent excess burden figure that arises in the traditional Harberger model with unitary substitution elasticities.

Another Model Says Yes

Does the Harberger Model Greatly Understate the Excess Burden of the Corporate Tax?

Michael J. Boskin

A New Test of the Neutrality Hypothesis

Public Debt and U.S. Saving

Argues that the Vickers Commission's banking reforms will not protect Britain from another financial crisis and proposes Limited Purpose Banking as an effective alternative approach to regulating the financial system.

Laurence J. Kotlikoff

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