Housing Affordability Options for First Home Owner-Occupiers in Australia: A Simulation Analysis

This paper presents a simulation analysis of several policies, or policy proposals, for improving housing affordability for first home owner-occupiers in Australia: the First Home Owner Grant, housing equity partnerships and deposit loans. The focus is on the impact of these measures for housing demand, the private saving rate and house prices. The simulations apply a housing tenure choice model in which a representative adult household makes a lifetime plan concerning when to buy and sell a house, and the amount of housing and non-housing consumption over its adult lifetime. An insight from the lifecycle framework is that policies to improve housing affordability can have two effects on housing demand and house prices: a life-cycle timing effect and a liquidity effect; and it is possible that these effects will work in opposite directions on housing demand and therefore house pricHousing economics, household saving

Sustainable Preferences and Damage Abatement:Value Judgments and Implications for Consumption Streams

This paper examines the implications of adopting alternative value judgements when evaluating future consumption streams in the context of damage abatement. The paper focusses on a form of ‘sustainable preferences’ designed to avoid either a dictatorship by present or by future generations which can arise when using a ‘standard’ social welfare function. Numerical examples are reported, based on a simple growth model, under alternative damage abatement parameters and welfare functions. The results illustrate how sustainable preferences effectively reduce the damages on future consumption by shifting consumption from the present to the future. This implies an intergenerational trade-off. An explicit policy of damage abatement under a standard social welfare function implies a similar intergenerational trade-off. However, the results suggest that damage abatement does not penalise current generations as much under sustainable preferences as it does under standard value judgements

Changes in the Taxation of Superannuation:Macroeconomic and Welfare Effects

This paper provides an applied general equilibrium analysis of several alternative taxation regimes applying to superannuation. It is motivated by the decision, announced by the Australian Government in its 2006 Budget, to exempt from tax all superannuation benefits received by recipients over 60 years of age. The analysis focuses on the implications of this and other superannuation tax regimes for intergenerational equity, national living standards, labour supply, saving and social welfare. The method of analysis is simulation of an open economy overlapping generations CGE model, calibrated to Australia. Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank the Australian Research Council for financial support for this work; and the Productivity Commission for providing data on age-specific government spending.

POPULATION AGEING AND INTERTEMPORAL CONSUMPTION: REPRESENTATIVE AGENT VERSUS SOCIAL PLANNER

This paper examines the optimal path of consumption over time in the context of population ageing. Older age groups are considered to have relatively greater ‘needs’, resulting for example from additional health costs. These differences give rise to the concept of the ‘equivalent number of persons’, as distinct from the population size. Emphasis is given to the difference between a framework involving a representative agent and one in which plans are made by a social planner. The precise conditions under which consumption growth paths are the same under the representative agent and the social planner are established. This equivalence is found to hold only in the case where the social planner’s value judgements are such that individuals are considered to be the appropriate unit of analysis. An alternative assumption, in which equivalent persons are regarded as the appropriate units, is found to give rise to a different optimal consumption path. Numerical examples demonstrate the relative orders of magnitude for a range of parameter values. The differences are found to be potentially important. The choice of appropriate consumption units – individuals or equivalent persons – is far from arbitrary since it involves possibly conflicting value judgements. This choice has implications for policies designed to influence the optimal saving rate, such as superannuation policy and the fiscal balance.Ageing;Intertemporal Consumption

Discounting and the Time Preference Rate: An Introduction

This paper provides an introduction to the evaluation of alternative time streams of consumption and the closely related concept of time preference. The potential sensitivity of comparisons, especially to the choice of time preference rate and elasticity of marginal valuation, is demonstrated. The nature of time preference, based on an axiomatic approach, is then discussed. The analysis of optimisation over time leads to the concept of the social time preference rate, and a difficulty with using this rate is highlighted. Finally, complications introduced by non-income differences between individuals are examined. Emphasis is placed on the central role of value judgements.

The Labour Supply and Savings Effects of Superannuation Tax Changes

This paper investigates the effects on labour supply, consumption and savings of a change in the superannuation tax structure, involving the taxation of contributions to a fund, pre-retirement earnings of the fund, and the benefits received from the fund during retirement. The effects on lifetime plans of tax changes are investigated using a simple three-period model in which the final period is retirement. The effects of unanticipated changes, requiring revisions to plans, are examined. Although the partial effects of particular tax changes are unambiguous, the effects of allowing for a government budget constraint mean that it is difficult to predict a priori how labour supply is likely to be affected. However, private savings unambiguously fall.

Population Ageing in New Zealand: The Impact on Living Standards and the Optimal Rate of Saving with a Flexible Real Exchange Rate

The purpose of this paper is to extend the simulation analysis of population ageing in Guest, Bryant and Scobie (2003). In that paper a single-good Ramsey-Solow model was calibrated for New Zealand and used to simulate the impact of population ageing on optimal national saving and average living standards over the next 100 years. There are several innovations in the present paper. One is to allow for tradable and non-tradable goods and thereby to introduce a real exchange rate. Changes in the real exchange rate due to population ageing produce substitution effects between tradable and non-tradable goods, in both consumption and investment. Other innovations in this paper are an outward-looking model of utility, a proportion of rule-of-thumb consumers, and a vintage capital model. The simulations of population ageing are conducted by first deriving a range of demographic projections from alternative assumptions about fertility, mortality and immigration. The resulting series for population and employment by age group are weighted to account for age-specific labour productivity levels and consumption demands. The model is solved by finding optimal paths of investment and consumption from an initial steady state to a new steady state following a demographic shock. The sanguine assessment of the impact of population ageing on living standards and national saving in Guest, Bryant and Scobie (2003) remains intact following the extensions applied to the model in this paper. That is, the cost of ageing is equivalent in its effect on living standards to an annual loss of labour productivity growth of about a quarter of one percent over the next 50 years. The optimal path for national saving implies a rise of up to 2% of GDP over the next decade, relative to that which would have been optimal in the absence of population ageing. In all the cases considered, the optimal level of savings then trends down, so that by 2051 it would be about 2 percentage points of GDP lower than the level that would have been optimal were the population age structure to have remained unchanged.consumption; saving; inter-temporal paths; Ramsey model; population ageing; foreign exchange; New Zealand

Population Ageing In New Zealand: Implications for Living Standards and the Optimal Rate of Saving

Over the next 50 years, New Zealand’s population will age substantially. There has been wide debate about whether New Zealand should prepare for population ageing by increasing national savings. The debate had not, however, involved explicit consideration of possible time paths for savings, consumption, debt, and other relevant macroeconomic variables; nor have explicit principles been offered for determining which of these time paths are to be preferred. This paper addresses the question of choosing time paths through the use of a Ramsey-Solow model of optimal saving, adapted for investigating problems of population ageing. The results suggest that population ageing alone would not justify increases in national savings rates beyond those envisaged by current policy. The cost of ageing in terms of reduced real consumption is not large enough to justify large additional savings beyond those currently predicted, and the concomitant reduction in current consumption. The findings concerning national savings and living standards are robust to a variety of specifications of demographic conditions, interest rates, and productivity growth.consumption; saving; inter-temporal paths; Ramsey model; population ageing; New Zealand

Employees' Choice of Superannuation Plan: Effects of Risk Transfer Costs

Consistent with a worldwide trend away from defined benefits towards accumulation benefits, many Australian employers who traditionally offered their workers defined superannuation benefits are closing their defined benefit plans to new members and/or offering existing members the option of transferring to an accumulation plan. There has also been a push to allow members greater choice in terms of both funds and investments. Against this background, the Superannuation Scheme for Australian Universities (SSAU) made an offer to its members in 1998 to transfer from the defined benefit section to an accumulation-style plan. Their position was that the choice of fund for employees should be a matter for the employer and the employees at the workplace or their respective representative organizations. At the conclusion of the offer period only one-third of SSAU members had elected to transfer to the Investment Choice Plan (ICP). This study seeks to explain why the majority of SSAU members chose to remain in the defined benefit plan when offered the option of transferring to the accumulation-style ICP. We propose that ‘risk transfer costs’ explain the low ICP acceptance rate. Research findings show that both those who chose to stay in the DBP and those who elected to transfer to the ICP were prepared to accept tradeoffs in their choice. DBP members were prepared to forego a higher quantum of expected benefits for greater security of benefits expected in the DBP, whereas the ICP members were prepared to forego such security and accepted higher investment risk in return for a higher expected quantum and greater control over their benefits. Differences in financial proficiency and differences across academic disciplines confirm that risk transfer costs were a key reason for the majority of SSAU members rejecting the ICP choice. Important implications arising from this study include the need for greater transparency of the risk transfer costs involved in offers of benefit structure change, such as that offered by the SSAU, and the need to incorporate compensation for such costs into the offer. Cognizance also needs to be taken of the major risk transfer cost of becoming informed about superannuation and the consequences of such costs for the Government’s intentions to mandate superannuation fund choice for all Australian workers