This paper examines policies to index Social Security taxes or benefits to changes in the ratio of workers to beneficiaries, allowing for auto-correction for changing demographic factors.

This paper discusses specific proposals for reducing the United States' deficit that draw on the lessons from past fiscal consolidations.

This study analyzes public sector salaries and benefits in Wisconsin, with a particular focus on disentangling the risk-adjusted value of pension benefits offered in the public sector from accounting conventions that can understate the cost and value of defined benefit pension plans.

Reducing federal employee compensation to market levels could save taxpayers roughly $77 billion per year.

This paper ranks all 50 states according to how costly their public-employee compensation packages are relative to private-sector standards.

Our data show that land prices were more volatile than house prices during the recent boom/bust cycle. In areas where land was inexpensive in 2000, the land share of property value jumped during the boom, and this rise in the land share was a useful predictor of the subsequent crash in house...

This paper proposes a measure of the distributional burden of servicing debt Using alternative assumptions about financing, we assess the distributional burden of the current level of government debt and the burden of future debt projected to accumulate under current law, current policy, and the...

Given the slow growth of labor productivity in recent years, some have argued that the boost from information technology may have run its course Our analysis points to a less pessimistic conclusion While projections of economic developments are always difficult, our judgment is that "No, the...

The recent slowdown in the rate of decline for semiconductor prices suggested by the PPI is puzzling in light of evidence that the performance of MPUs has continued to improve at a rapid pace. The authors argue that hedonic indexes provide a more accurate measure of price changes.