This paper models the linkage between a country's national security and the defense spending of its allies and adversaries. The cost of an arms race is introduced into the alliance public good framework of Olson and Zeckhauser. Contrary to their presumption, for a cooperative treaty to increase...

The sum of Hicksian compensation measure is shown to be the incorrect criterion for determining potential Pareto improvements. The correct criterion is a weighted average of households' compensation measures and is not, in principle, independent of the distribution of costs and benefits across...

A business tax is neutral if it does not effect the firms' decisions at the margin. We analyze the effect of a business tax on the firms' investment decision. The "implicit rent deduction" and "immediate write-off" methods are found to be special cases of our general tax design. The implication...

In this paper we argue that rules are desirable in the conduct of fiscal policy. Since the market does not constrain federal borrowing, policy-imposed constraints are necessary to maintain fiscal prudence. A simple rule such as the annually balanced budget is sufficient for fiscal prudence but...

The paper estimates a life-cycle model of consumption, saving, and wealth accumulation from disaggregated time series data containing an explicit age dimension. Highly significant age effects indicate the importance of age disaggregated analysis. Interest elasticities of saving are considerably...

It is now well known that "optimal" government policies may not be time consistent--that is, ex post optimal. Time consistency considerations can be shown to reverse the conclusions about the relative merits of different tax structures that are drawn from Ramsey type analysis. In this paper I...