Taxation in an Overlapping Generations Model with Human Capital

We examine the impact of flat-rate taxes on intergenerational equity in an overlapping generations model of a small open economy, assuming the intergenerational externality of human capital accumulation. The externality may cause the difference between the growth rates in private human capital and in average human capital of the economy. If the externality is sufficiently small, the introduction of an interest income tax will benefit all future generations. In contrast, if it is sufficiently great, the introduction of a wage tax could harm all generations by raising financial asset holdings and thereby reducing consumption.     

Rate-of-return dominance and efficiency in an experimental economy

Summary. One of the main challenges for monetary economics is to explain the use of assets that are dominated in rate-of-return as media of exchange. We use experimental methods to study how a fiat money might come to be used in transactions when an identically marketable, dividend-bearing asset, a consol, is also available. Our experimental economies, which have an overlapping generations structure, have the property that the only stationary rational expectations equilibria (SREE) require exclusive use of the consol as the medium of exchange. In a baseline treatment, agents use the consol exclusively, as would occur in an SREE. However, in other treatments, we observe episodes of rate-of-return dominance,with consistent use of fiat money as a medium of exchange. The results show that two properties of our economies are associated with the rate of return dominance anomaly. The first is a history of trading with fiat money, prior to the introduction of the consol. The second is the timing of the dividend payment; when the dividend payment follows the execution of trades between generations, hoarding of the consol occurs on the part of the old, who earn dividends by hoarding. In our economies, settling transactions with a dividend-bearing asset does not improve allocations over those resulting from trading with fiat money. Received: July 11, 2002; revised version: July 25, 2002 RID="*" ID="*"We thank Anne Villamil, participants in the 2000 Purdue University Conference on Monetary Economics, the Summer 2000 meetings of the Economic Science Association, and a referee, for very helpful comments. We thank the Krannert School of Management and the Purdue University Center for International Business, Education and Research for financial support and Vivian Lei for research assistance. We also thank Ron Michener for referring us to the historical account of the early introduction of money into the American colonies, as reported by Benjamin Franklin. Correspondence to: G. Camera     

Elasticity of substitution and growth: normalized CES in the Diamond model

Summary. It is often asserted that the more substitutable capital and labor are in the aggregate production the more rapidly an economy grows. Recently this has been formally confirmed within the Solow model by Klump and de La Grandville (2000). This paper demonstrates that there exists no such monotonic relationship between factor substitutability and growth in the Diamond overlapping-generations model. In particular, we prove that, if capital and labor are relatively substitutable, a country with a greater elasticity of substitution exhibits lower per capita output growth in transit and in steady state. Received: October 27, 2001; revised version: February 25, 2002     

The Effects of Emission Permits on Growth and the Environment

We develop an overlapping generations model of growth and the environment in which industrial firms produce environmentally harmful emissions. A government controls the emissions by assigning emission quotas to firms, and permits could be issued and freely traded as financial instruments across firms on the basis of the quotas. We show that an environmental policy that decreases an aggregate number of emission quotas could degenerate economic growth and lower environmental quality in the long run. We also show the implications of this result for environmental policy.     

人力资本投资失衡的劳动力市场分割原因剖析

劳动力市场分割会阻碍农村劳动力进入主要劳动力市场，这使得农村居民人力资本投资低于统一、开放、可竞争劳动力市场的数量。劳动力市场分割三个原因中主要是制度性歧视，因此，可以通过新制度安排以缓解城乡间人力资本投资的差距。     

人力资本激励误区辨析

人力资本激励的良好效果,取决于人力资本的准确定位。现实当中对人力资本的激励存在很多认识误区,大大地限制了激励的效果。本文从八个方面对之进行了辨析,以还人力资本的本来定位,以求人力资本的高效约束与激励。     

Local Public Debt with Overlapping Generations

Discussions of Ricardian equivalence for local public debt have generally centered on the role of land within a particular generation. This paper examines the full neutrality of local public debt in determining whether local public debt is neutral in the resource allocation between (1) mobile and immobile individuals who belong to the same generation, and between (2) individuals belonging to different generations. We find that local debt neutrality continues to hold across generations under migration.     

Employment and Welfare Effects of a Two-Tier Unemployment Compensation System

In Germany, as in many OECD countries, such as the United Kingdom, unemployment compensation consists of unemployment insurance and unemployment assistance. Unemployment assistance is provided subsequent to the expiration of entitlement to unemployment insurance and is lower. The effects of this two-tier unemployment compensation system are studied in a general equilibrium job search model with endogenous distributions of income, wealth, and employment which is calibrated with regard to the characteristics of the German economy. Our results are as follows: (i) employment is a decreasing function of both unemployment insurance and unemployment assistance. (ii) Aggregate savings are (not) a monotone decreasing function of unemployment assistance (unemployment insurance) payments. (iii) Optimal unemployment compensation payments are found to be a decreasing function over time.     

Debt, Death and Taxes

Does the level of government debt affect living standards and if so, to what extent? We quantify the impact of the U.S. federal debt using an open economy overlapping generations model in which consumers have long but finite lifetimes. A demographic structure allows fiscal policy changes to have different effects on different agents, and reveals the linkages between public debt, output and international trade. We find that reducing the debt has relatively modest impacts on aggregates, while reducing government spending substantially raises U.S. incomes and welfare. Therefore, this paper contributes to the current debate regarding whether U.S. federal government budget surpluses should be used to retire government debt.     

Time and Uncertainty in Overlapping Generations Economies

This paper shows the general reversibility of every perfect foresight equilibrium of an overlapping generations economy. It then shows and characterizes the existence of reversible sunspot equilibria in these economies as well, which seems to be at odds with our intuition about the irreversibility of a tree of events. Although the paper establishes also that such reversible stochastic equilibria constitute a negligible subset of all the equilibria of their class, their mere existence may be considered somewhat puzzling for this intuition. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D50, D80, D90.