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In this article, we present a model that can account for the changes in the current account balance in China since the 2000s. Our results suggest that inadequate insurance through government programs for the elderly and the decline in family insurance due to the one-child policy led to large increases in the household saving rate. These increases coupled with the financial frictions preventing the household saving from being invested in domestic firms resulted in large current account surpluses until 2008. Relaxation of financial constraints, on the other hand, was responsible for the decline in the current account surplus after 2008.

This paper provides new evidence about the link between firm-level total factor productivity (TFP) and stock returns. We estimate firm-level TFP and show that it is strongly related to several firm characteristics such as size, the book-to-market ratio, investment, and hiring rate. Low productivity firms earn a significant premium over high productivity firms in the following year, and this premium is countercyclical. We show that a production-based asset pricing model calibrated to match the cross section of measured firm-level TFPs can replicate the empirical relationship between TFP, many firm characteristics, and stock returns. Our results offer an explanation as to how these firm characteristics rationally predict returns. This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance.

In 2011, the publicly held debt-to-GDP ratio in the USA reached 68 % and is expected to continue rising. Many proposals to curb the government deficit and the resulting debt are being discussed. In this paper, we use the standard neoclassical growth model to examine the future path of output, budget deficits, and debt in the US economy under different tax policies. While this framework is relatively simple, it incorporates the general equilibrium effects of tax policy, which are often missing from the static scoring method used by the Congressional Budget Office. Our results show that debt-to-GNP ratios above 100 % are likely to continue into the future and that even small labor supply elasticities have a significant impact on these projections. We also find that labor income tax rates higher than 40 % are needed for the deficit-to-GNP ratio to return to its historical level in the long run. Such high tax rates, however, result in about 10% lower per capita GNP and large welfare costs at the steady state compared to the historical tax rates.

This paper examines the time path of saving rates between 1970 and 2010 in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico through the lens of the neoclassical growth model. The findings indicate that two factors, the growth rate of TFP and fiscal policy, are able to account for some of the major fluctuations in saving rates observed during this period. In particular, we find that the model accounts for the low saving rates in Chile compared to Colombia until the late 1980s and the reversal in the saving rates thereafter. Also, a combination of high TFP growth and tax reforms that substantially reduced capital taxation seems to be responsible for the impressive increase in Chile’s saving rate in mid-1980s.

There are many federal, state, and local laws that distort housing decisions and prices. However, it is often difficult to tease out the quantitative impact of such policies. In this paper, we examine the implications of one of the most significant tax changes initiated by voters in the United States on house prices, housing turnover, and household welfare. In 1978 California passed Proposition 13, which lowered property tax rates and restricted future property tax increases. We find that the introduction of Proposition 13 leads to a 15 percent increase in house prices and a 3.3 percent decrease in the moving rates. The elimination of Proposition 13, however, leads to modest changes in house prices and mobility but sizable welfare gains.

In this paper we examine the role of social security in an economy populated by overlapping generations of individuals with time-inconsistent preferences who face mortality risk, individual income risk, and borrowing constraints. We find that unfunded social security lowers the capital stock, output, and consumption for consumers with time-consistent or time-inconsistent preferences. However, it may raise or lower welfare depending on the strength of time inconsistency.

Despite much work, economists have not been able to quantitatively account for the differences in the Japanese and U.S. saving rates after World War II. In this paper, we show that the use of actual Japanese total factor productivity growth rates in a standard growth model generates saving rates that are reasonably similar to the Japanese data between 1956 and 2000.

We study the effects of network externalities within a protocol for matching faculty to offices in a new building. Using web and survey data on faculty's attributes and choices, we identify the different layers of the social network: institutional affiliation, coauthorships, and friendships. We quantify the effects of network externalities on choices and outcomes, disentangle the layers of the networks, and quantify their relative influence. Finally, we assess the protocol used from a welfare perspective. Our study suggests the importance and feasibility of accounting for network externalities in assignment problems and evaluates techniques that can be employed to this end.

This paper investigates the growth experience of one country in detail in order to enhance our understanding of important factors that affect economic growth. Using a two-sector model, we identify low productivity growth in the agricultural sector as the main reason for the divergence of income per capita between Turkey and its peer countries between 1968 and 2005. An extended model that incorporates distortions in the use of intermediate goods in producing agricultural output indicates that policies that have different effects across sectors and across time may be important in explaining the growth experience of countries.

Much of the existing literature on social security has taken the extreme assumption that individuals have little or no altruism; this paper takes an opposite assumption that there is full two-sided altruism. When households insure members that belong to the same family line, privatizing social security can gain public support. In our benchmark model calibrated to the U.S. economy, privatization without compensation is favoured by 52% of the population. If social security participants are fully compensated for their contributions, and the transition to privatization is financed by a combination of debt and a consumption tax, 58% experience a welfare gain. These gains and the resulting public support for social security reform depend critically on a flexible labour market. If the labour supply elasticity is low, then support for privatization disappears.