Housing Tenure and Wealth Distribution in Life-Cycle Economies

Common practice in the housing and wealth distribution literature has proceeded as if the modeling of housing rental markets was unnecessary due to renters’ relative low levels of wealth and the small fraction they represent in the total population. This paper shows, however, that their inclusion matters substantially when dealing with wealth concentration over the life cycle. Renters are concentrated in the poorer and younger groups. This concentration results in a pattern of housing wealth concentration over an agent’s life that is decreasing, with a slope as steep as that of nonhousing (or financial) wealth. The author constructs an overlapping-generations economy with a housing rental market that is consistent with this fact

Model-driven approach for supporting the mapping of parallel algorithms to parallel computing platforms

The trend from single processor to parallel computer architectures has increased the importance of parallel computing. To support parallel computing it is important to map parallel algorithms to a computing platform that consists of multiple parallel processing nodes. In general different alternative mappings can be defined that perform differently with respect to the quality requirements for power consumption, efficiency and memory usage. The mapping process can be carried out manually for platforms with a limited number of processing nodes. However, for exascale computing in which hundreds of thousands of processing nodes are applied, the mapping process soon becomes intractable. To assist the parallel computing engineer we provide a model-driven approach to analyze, model, and select feasible mappings. We describe the developed toolset that implements the corresponding approach together with the required metamodels and model transformations. We illustrate our approach for the well-known complete exchange algorithm in parallel computing. © 2013 Springer-Verlag

Economic Perspectives on Aging

The aging of the American population will be a critical public policy issue in the years ahead. This paper surveys the recent literature on the economics of aging, with a special emphasis on government spending on the aged. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that the proportion of the elderly in the total population will increase while the proportion of the working-age population will decline. This demographic shift implies a significant growth in the number of beneficiaries of major federal entitlement programs. Existing rules and escalating health care costs are expected to lead to fiscal pressures and to pose challenges for economic growth. The paper offers the author’s assessment of the forces that determine government spending on retirees. It also examines how the retirement and health care of older citizens might be financed, and measures the potential impact of different reform proposals. Finally, it provides an introduction to an edited volume, Government Spending on the Elderly

A Retrospective Look at the U.S. Productivity Growth Resurgence

It is now widely recognized that information technology (IT) was critical to the dramatic acceleration of U.S. labor productivity growth in the mid-1990s. This paper traces the evolution of productivity estimates to document how and when this perception emerged. Early studies concluded that IT was relatively unimportant. It was only after the massive IT investment boom of the late 1990s that this investment and underlying productivity increases in the IT-producing sectors were identified as important sources of growth. Although IT has diminished in significance since the dot-com crash of 2000, we project that private sector productivity growth will average around 2.5 percent per year for the next decade, a pace that is only moderately below the average for the 1995-2005 period