The social security program now provides a constant real benefit throughout each retirees lifetime. This paper examines whether total welfare would rise if benefits were lower in early retirement years (when most individuals have some saving with which to finance consumption) and higher in later...

In an earlier paper we analyzed a method of combining traditional tax financed pay-as-you-go Social Security benefits with annuities financed by Personal Retirement Accounts. We showed that such a combination could maintain the level of retirement income projected in current Social Security law...

In this paper we study the transition from a pay-as-you-go system of Social Security pensions to an investment-based system in an economy in which portfolio returns and capital profitability are both uncertain. The paper extends earlier studies by Feldstein and Samwick that modeled the...

This note lays out the basic Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemiological model of contagion, with a target audience of economists who want a framework for understanding the effects of social distancing and containment policies on the evolution of contagion and interactions with the...

Charging infrastructure is critical to electric vehicle (EV) adoption, but for chargers to be most useful, EV drivers need to know in real time where they are and whether they are working and available. We investigate the availability of real-time data from DC fast chargers on six major US...

The D4 RIN is the tradable compliance certificate for the biomass-based diesel mandate in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Understanding the price dynamics of the D4 RIN is important for understanding the RFS because its price sets a ceiling on the ethanol RIN (D6) and because some observers...

We investigate the flattening Phillips relation by making two departures from standard specifications. First, we measure slack using real activity variables that are bandpass filtered or year-over-year changes in activity (these are similar), instead of gaps. Second, we study the components of...

We review and assess the monetary policy framework currently used by the Federal Reserve, with special focus on policies that operate through the slope of the term structure, including forward guidance and large scale asset purchases. These slope policies are important at the zero lower bound....

We develop a Bayesian latent factor model of the joint evolution of GDP per capita for 113 countries over the 118 years from 1900 to 2017. We find considerable heterogeneity in rates of convergence, including rates for some countries that are so slow that they might not converge (or diverge) in...

To reliably achieve deep decarbonization of the US power sector, a candidate policy must perform robustly across a range of possible future trajectories of demand, fossil fuel prices, and prices of new wind and solar capacity. Using a modified version of the NREL ReEDS model with scenarios that...