The US government accumulated a large amount of debt from WWII. The government debt-to-GDP ratio in the US peaked at 108% in 1946. This ratio dropped dramatically in the following two decades, to 35% in 1966. Simultaneously, the US experienced a massive baby boom. This paper studies the relationship between these two phenomena in a modified version of the Barro-Becker model. In the model, the g...

This paper assesses whether the UK public finances were sustainable for the period 1919 to 2001 using a nonlinear representation of the debt to GDP ratio and thus provides a more robust test of debt sustainability. Empirical evidence supports debt sustainability. Moreover, the ESTAR representation is evidence that sustainability is the result of active debt management rather than tax-smoothing....

The traditional textbook method of calculating a corporation’s cost of debt capital tends to minimize the practical process used to arrive at that cost. This is particularly true if the corporation has issued a coupon bond at either premium or discount. The theoretical before-tax cost of debt is easily calculated and does include the amortization of the discount or premium, but the significance...

This paper characterizes tax and debt dynamics in Ramsey plans for incomplete markets economies that generalize an Aiyagari et al. (2002) economy by allowing a single asset traded by the government to be risky. Long run debt and tax dynamics can be attracted not only to the first-best continuation allocations discovered by Aiyagari et al. for quasi-linear preferences, but instead to a continuat...

We present a theory of endogenous fiscal policy and growth. Fiscal policy — debt, income tax, spending on local public goods and public investment — is determined through legislative bargaining. Economic growth depends directly on public investment, private investment in human capital and, via learning-by-doing, labor supply. The model predicts that the economy converges to a balanced growth pa...

Innovation effects on firm value have not been effectively discussed because previous studies ignore the market structure and tax shields from research and development (R&D) (e.g., Hirschey and Weygandt (1985), Shevlin (1991)). Market structures of personal computer (PC) firms are explored in this paper to the degree to which innovation increases firm value depending on market structure charact...

The public debt stock in some economically developed countries continues to increase because of a lack of tax revenues and the concomitant burdens of social security. Many of those countries suffer from lower birth rates and consequently, have fewer children. Child allowances might be an effective way to increase fertility, leading to higher future tax revenues through an increase in the number...