"Most state and local retirement plans strive for full funding, at least by actuarial standards. Funding measured at market values fluctuates and often falls short. A common argument for full funding is that pensions are a form of deferred compensation that does not justify a debt. The paper...

Martin Feldstein's recent article on U.S. capital income taxes perpetuates the myth that capital gains are taxed at 15 percent: yet once the AMT, child tax credits and state taxes are taken into account, the top effective rate is at least 35.8 percent.

The transversality condition on government debt requires a zero limit of discounted future debt. The paper shows that, in a stochastic economy, the relevant discount rate depends on the probability distribution of future debt over states of nature. Discount rates on future government debt,...

This paper shows how a cash-in-advance model of money can be written in a way that combines a simple, yet empirically defensible, money demand function with an asset pricing equation that is similar to the standard barter-economy Euler equations. Return premia are determined as in the barter...

It is known that when people generate externalities, a birth also generates an externality and efficiency requires a Pigou tax/subsidy on having children. The size of the externality from a birth is important for studying policy. We calculate the size of this "population externality" in a...