Carbon taxation has been studied primarily in social planner or infinitely lived agent models, which trade off the welfare of future and current generations. Such frameworks obscure the potential for carbon taxation to produce a generational win-win. This paper develops a large-scale, dynamic...

Will smart machines do to humans what the internal combustion engine did to horses – make them obsolete? If so, can putting people out of work or, at least, good work leave them unable to buy what smart machines produce? Our model's answer is yes. Over time and under the right conditions,...

The 2015 Paris Accord is meant to control our planet's rising temperature. But it may be doing the opposite in gradually, rather than immediately reducing CO2 emissions. The Accord effectively tells dirty-energy producers to "use it or lose it." This may be accelerating their extraction and...

Anthropogenic climate change produces two conceptually distinct negative economic externalities. The first is an expected path of climate damage. The second, which is this paper's focus, is an expected path of economic risk. To isolate the climate-risk problem, we consider mean-zero, symmetric...

We investigate optimal consumption, asset accumulation and portfolio decisions in a realistically calibrated life-cycle model with flexible labor supply. Our framework allows for wage rate uncertainly, variable labor supply, social security benefits and portfolio choice over safe bonds and risky...

This paper develops a perfect foresight general equilibrium simulation model of life cycle savings that may be used to investigate the potential impact of a wide range of government policies on national savings and economic welfare. The model can provide quantitative answers to a number of...

This paper develops a large-scale, dynamic life-cycle model to simulate Russia's demographic and fiscal transition under favorable and unfavorable fossil-fuel price regimes. The model includes Russia, the U.S., China, India, the EU, and Japan+ (Japan plus Korea). The model predicts dramatic...

We simulate corporate tax reform in a single good, five-region (U.S., Europe, Japan, China, India) model, featuring skilled and unskilled labor, detailed region-specific demographics and fiscal policies. Eliminating the model's U.S. corporate income tax produces rapid and dramatic increases in...

Generational policy is a fundamental aspect of a nation's fiscal affairs. The policy involves redistributing resources across generations and allocating to particular generations the burden of paying the government's bills. This chapter of the second edition of The Handbook of Public Economics...

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...