The macroeconomic effects on growth, investment and private sector employment of different ways of rolling back the welfare state are analysed. Cutting public spending on private goods induces a lower interest rate, a higher wage, a lower capital stock and a fall in employment. Cutting public...

This paper reviews experiments in macroeconomics, pointing out the usefulness and the weaknesses of this approach. A substantially large number of macroeconomic issues has been analyzed in the laboratory, ranging from monetary economics to fiscal policy and international trade to name a few,...

Political distortions can aggravate macroeconomic volatility. The aim of this paper is to analyze a fiscal policy institution capable of reducing the influence of such distortions on fiscal policy outcomes. We introduce the distinction between mandatory and discretionary public spending in the...

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...

Notional Defined Contributions (NDC) systems mimic the incentive structureof fully funded social security while preserving the Pay-as-you-go nature ofmost current systems. We study size-preserving social reforms which replacethe current US system with alternative NDCs with many alternative...

We provide an introduction to optimal fiscal and monetary policy using the primal approach to optimal taxation. We use this approach to address how fiscal and monetary policy should be set over the long run and over the business cycle. We find four substantive lessons for policymaking: Capital...