Past government spending in Japan is imposing a significant fiscal burden that is reflected in a net debt to output ratio near 150 percent. In addition, an aging Japanese society implies that public expenditures and transfers payments relative to output are projected to continue to rise until at...

We use balance sheet and National Income and Products Accounts (NIPA) data to calibrate factor shares in a model with three factors (land, labor, and capital) and three sectors (business, household, and government). These estimates are used in an overlapping generations model with land to study...

In this paper, we use a general equilibrium model of endogenous growth in which there is heterogeneity in skill, income, and tax rates to evaluate the effect of progressivity of taxes on growth and welfare. In this framework, changes in the progressivity of tax rates can have positive growth...

Without policy reforms, the aging of the U.S. population is likely to increase the burden of the currently unfunded social security and medicare systems. In this paper we build an applied general equilibrium model and incorporate the population projections made by the Social Security...

We explore the quantitative implications of uncertainty about the length of life and a lack of annuity markets for life cycle consumption in a general equilibrium overlapping generations model in which markets are otherwise complete. Empirical studies find that consumption displays a hump shape...

(Copyright: Elsevier)

We study how an occasionally binding capacity constraint affects the properties of business cycles. A real business cycle model is constructed where production takes place at individual plants and the number of plants operated varies over the cycle. The capacity constraint binds in states where...