Cross-sectional earnings inequality has risen sharply since the late 1970s in the United States. It remains an open question how this development has affected the insurance and income redistribution roles played by Social Security. The paper's first question is: How have the government...

In a static setting, whether consumption or labor income is progressively taxed isirrelevant for household choices and welfare. In a dynamic setting, however, thesetwo forms of progressivity have markedly di erent implications for how earnings varyalong the life-cycle: in a stylized life-cycle...

I construct a unified macroeconomic framework by incorporating frictional markets in a neoclassical environment. This framework is analytically tractable despite search frictions, income risks and endogenous money distributions. I use this framework to formalize a theory that the variety and the...

There is mounting evidence of a complex system of multi-directional links between fertility, productivity and inequality. The contribution of this study is a multi-country analysis of these three variables as a simultaneous system in a VECM framework using annual time series data for the UK,...

Entitlement programs have become an increasing component of total government spending in the US over the last six decades. To some observers, this growth of the welfare state is excessive and unwarranted. To others, it is a welcome counter-acting force to the rapid increase in income inequality....

This paper proposes a methodology to assess the pro-poorness of government fiscal policies in view of bringing marginal reforms. A government policy is said to be pro-poor if it benefits the poor proportionally more than the non-poor. The author first derives the poverty elasticity for the...

The paper introduces the social accounting matrix, SAM, and treats the conversion of the SAM into an economy wide model that employs fixed relative prices and clears market imbalances via flexible quantities. The paper reviews multiplier results relating to the trade-off between economic growth...

The paper demonstrates abilities of the SAM to investigate issues relevant for an advanced economy. i.e. The Netherlands. It studies SAM multipliers for an initial year, examines how they change over later years, and identifies segments that were gainers and losers over ten years. Available data...

We are motivated by four stylized facts computed for emerging and developed economies: (i) business cycle movements are wider in emerging countries; (ii) economies in emerging countries experience greater economic policy uncertainty; (iii) emerging economies are more polarized and less...

We use a stylized model to show that, if transfers to the poor are founded on a security argument, there is a negative trade-o¤ between law enforcement expenditures and criminality. In contrast, if transfers are based on altruism, the correlation between the same variables may appear positive....