All of the attempts to end the euro crisis and to return the Eurozone countries to healthy growth rates of income and employment have failed. The options that are currently being discussed are not likely to be more successful. If there is a politically feasible way out of the crisis, it will be...

This paper discusses the effects of the interaction between inflation and the taxation of capital income. The principal conclusions are: (1) Inflation substantially increases the total effective tax rate on the income from capital used in the nonfinancial corporate sector. The total effective...

This study examines the potential effects on personal savings of alternative types of tax rules. The analysis makes use of two extensive samples of information on individual savings and financial income: the 1972 Consumer Expenditure Survey and a stratified random sample of 26,000 individual tax...

This paper begins by examining the ways in which pension liabilities are and are not like corporate bonds. Some conceptual issues involved in valuing future pension obligations are then discussed. The second section considers the advantage to firms of fully funding their pension obligations and...

Given the current corporate tax structure in the U.S., inflation may have an important impact on the production decisions of firms, notably the choice of capital durability. This paper presents a model of competitive behavior in which firms may choose the durability of their capital goods. We...

Firms respond to fluctuations in demand by changing their inventories and their levels of production. The relative magnitudes of the inventory and production responses have important implications for the overall cyclical behavior of the economy. Government policies that affect the costs of...

This paper emphasizes the importance of the interaction between tax rules and the management of monetary policy. The monetary authorities' failure to recognize the implications of the tax structure has caused them to underestimate just how expansionary monetary policy has been. Moreover, because...

This paper is an analytic comment on two chapters of the Economic Report of the President for 2006. Chapter One deals with the economy in 2005 and the outlook for the future. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of the expansion in 2005 but not an explanation of why the expansion occurred...

The evidence and analysis in this paper support the earlier findings of Feldstein and Horioka (1980) that sustained increases in domestic savings rates induce approximately equal increases in domestic rates of investment. New estimates for the post-OPEC period 1974-79 imply that each extra...

This paper reports new estimates of the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates based on a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform. This comparison is done by using a panel of more than 4000 individual tax returns created...