The long (and short) on taxation and expenditure policies

Much of the 1992 presidential campaign focused on which fiscal policies would best promote economic growth. In this article, Zsolt Becsi develops an analytical and graphical framework to evaluate the long- and short-run effects of a variety of taxation and expenditure policies. ; Becsi shows that many tax schemes in their macro-economic effects are essentially taxes on labor or capital or both. While taxes on labor and capital both tend to depress private consumption and output in the long run, Becsi shows that a revenue-neutral reduction of capital taxes and increase in labor taxes are likely to be contractionary in the short run and expansionary in the long run. ; Becsi discusses several ways of spending the peace dividend from a reduction in defense expenditures. He shows that use of the dividend to reduce capital taxes causes consumption to rise in the long run with ambiguous effects on output. In the short run, output and consumption will move in opposite directions, but whether output rises or falls is uncertain. Using the peace dividend to increase public investment will also promote a long-run rise of consumption with ambiguous long-run output effects, but without short-run contractionary effects.Taxation ; Expenditures, Public

Asset Price Volatility, Bubbles, and Process Switching

Evidence of excess volatilities of asset prices compared with those of market fundamentals is often attributed to speculative bubbles. This study examines the sense in which speculative bubbles could in theory lead to excess volatility, hut it demonstrates that some of the variance hounds evidence reported to date precludes bubbles as a reason why asset prices might violate such hounds. The findings must represent some other model misspecffication or market inefficiency. One important misspecification occurs when there searcher incorrectly specifies the time series properties of market fundamentals. A bubble-free example economy characterized by a potential switch in government policies produces paths of asset prices that would appear, to an unwary researcher, to contain bubbles.

Fiscal deficit reduction programs in developing countries: Stabilization versus growth in the presence of credit rationing

This paper presents a model for analyzing potential conflicts between short-run output and employment effects and medium-run growth effects of various fiscal actions. In the model, both firms and households are intertemporal optimizers; short-run wage stickiness and interest rate controls generate macroeconomic disequilibrium. The analysis focuses on the consequences of various government expenditure or deficit reduction policies.

Pubic Debt and U.S. Saving: A New Test of the Neutrality Hypothesis

The substantial post war decline in the U.S. saving rate has added great impetus to the debate over whether public debt policy crowds out saving. Rather than attempting to reject specific saving models, empirical research on debt policy and savings has primarily focused on the impact of particular policy variables on savings. In this paper we examine Barro's infinite horizon, intergenerationally altruistic model. A distinguishing feature of this modelis that aggregate consumption depends only on collective resources and not the age distribution of resources.To test this proposition we specify the Barro model under earnings uncertainty, rate of return uncertainty, and demographic change and test whether, given the level of consumption predicted by this model, variables measuring the age distribution of resources influence actual consumption. Data on the age distribution of resources are primarily obtained from the annual Current Population Surveys. Our results imply a rejection of the hypothesis that aggregate consumption is independent of the age distribution of resources.They therefore cast doubt on the contention that government debt policy does not affect consumption and saving.

Modeling great depressions: the depression in Finland in the 1990s

This paper is a primer on the great depressions methodology developed by Cole and Ohanian (1999, 2007) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002, 2007). We use growth accounting and simple dynamic general equilibrium models to study the depression that occurred in Finland in the early 1990s. We find that the sharp drop in real GDP over the period 1990?93 was driven by a combination of a drop in total factor productivity (TFP) during 1990?92 and of increases in taxes on labor and consumption and increases in government consumption during 1989?94, which drove down hours worked in Finland. We attempt to endogenize the drop in TFP in variants of the model with an investment sector and with terms-of-trade shocks but are unsuccessful.Depressions

Modeling Great Depressions: The Depression in Finland in the 1990s

This paper is a primer on the great depressions methodology developed by Cole and Ohanian (1999, 2007) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002, 2007). We use growth accounting and simple dynamic general equilibrium models to study the depression that occurred in Finland in the early 1990s. We find that the sharp drop in real GDP over the period 1990-93 was driven by a combination of a drop in total factor productivity (TFP) during 1990-92 and of increases in taxes on labor and consumption and increases in government consumption during 1989-94, which drove down hours worked in Finland. We attempt to endogenize the drop in TFP in variants of the model with an investment sector and with terms-of-trade shocks but are unsuccessful.

The prospects for mathematical logic in the twenty-first century

The four authors present their speculations about the future developments of mathematical logic in the twenty-first century. The areas of recursion theory, proof theory and logic for computer science, model theory, and set theory are discussed independently.Comment: Association for Symbolic Logi