Federal discount rate policies advocate both a high rate representing the marginal productivity of capital and a low rate representing the government borrowing rate. These differential discount rate policies could be inconsistent and biased in favor of projects on which the lower discount rate...

The conventional measure of the excess burden of a discrete increase in the rate of either a labor income tax or an excise tax is typically represented by a trapezoid in the supply/demand framework. This article adopts an alternative view of the incremental excess burden due to Mayshar and finds...

The excess burden of taxation typically has two graphical representations in undergraduate microeconomics and public finance textbooks: the IC/BC (indifference curve/budget constraint) representation and the demand/supply representation. The IC/BC representation has the advantage of showing the...

This paper models the midlife crisis as a decision on whether and when to realize a life dream, incorporating the key components of three psychology theories of midlife crises. It explains why a crisis (dream realization) tends to occur in the midlife if it occurs at all. Other results include...

We study the consumption pattern for a "repeated good" in which individuals choose both consumption frequency and intensity in response to income, price and setup cost. Results include that increased setup costs reduce frequency and increase intensity, and that the effects of a setup cost...

The absence of individual level data linking earnings histories to the receipt of Medicare benefits has hampered the study of the program's distributional properties. Data developed by the Social Security Administration for an early cohort of Medicare beneficiaries includes both earnings records...