Introduction 1. The long-run historical record 2. International perspective: the role of growth and fiscal policy 3. Other reasons for the decline in saving 3.1 Credit and insurance markets 3.2 Social security 3.3 Demographic factors 4. Do micro data help us to understand the decline in saving?

This paper uses a model with a continuum of equilibrium steady state unemployment rates to explore the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The existence of multiple steady state equilibria is explained by the presence of search and recruiting costs. I use the model to explain the current financial crisis as a shift to a high unemployment equilibrium, induced by the self-fulfilling beliefs of market...

It is an honor and privilege to address you as president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. For more than 100 years, this organization has represented the best of physician-scientists. Since it is now 2012, there is the possibility that this could be the last ASCI presidential address. But we will assume the Mayans miscalculated and that we should look to the future. With the A...

In recent decades political and economic interest has focused on a phenomenon known as the ‘growth of government’, a euphemism for rising public expenditure. Studies that have focused on the process are broadly classified into three distinct areas those that highlight the phenomenon (Saunders and Klau, 1985); those that identify the contributory factors (Henrekson, 1990) and those that embrace ...

57 National Tax Journal Vol. LIV, No. 1 Abstract This paper tests whether state and local fiscal policy depended on the number of seats in the legislature in the first half of the 20th century. We find that large legislatures spent more, as implied by the “Law of 1/n” from the fiscal commons/logrolling literature. The same relation appears in the latter half of the century, and therefore seems ...

The anemic pace of the recovery of the U.S. economy from the Great Recession has frequently been blamed on heightened uncertainty, much of which concerns the nation’s fiscal policy. Intuition suggests that increased policy uncertainty likely has different impacts on different industries, to the extent that industries differ in their exposure to government policies. This study utilizes industry ...

A Farmer-type Keynesian model is constructed to explore and exposit Keynesian ideas. The modeling innovation is to integrate Farmer’s approach with monetary exchange and to derive optimal monetary and fiscal policies. Two approaches are taken to optimal policy an approach in the spirit of New Keynesian sticky-wage-and-price models, and an a "sophisticated policy" approach. Optimal policies typi...

This paper explores how bequests affect redistributive fiscal policies. The main premise underlying our approach is that bequests act as a signal of parental affection. It is shown that private transfers in the form of bequests may not offset public transfers to a significant extent, even though such private transfers are altruistically motivated and are strictly positive for all but a negligib...

What is “power”? Most people have an intuitive notion of what it means. But scientists have not yet formulated a statement of the concept of power that is rigorous enough to be of use in the systematic study of this important social phenomenon. Power is here defined in terms of a relation between people, and is expressed in simple symbolic notation. From this definition is developed a statement...