Previous research has shown that wages in industries characterized by higher rates of technological change are higher. In addition, there is evidence that skill-biased technological change is responsible for the dramatic increase in the earnings of more educated workers relative to less educated workers that took place during the 1980s.
The U.S. Social Security system is in need of reform. Its trustees forecast that, absent changes, contributions will fall below benefits in 2012, and the system's trust fund will be exhausted in 2030. Many have discussed achieving system solvency by raising taxes and cutting benefits, but recently a more fundamental reform has been proposed, namely, privatization of some or all aspects of Social Security. This article identifies key economic issues that must be addressed in the debate over a privatized system in the U.S.
The objective of governments is to efficiently provide essential services and infrastructure to their jurisdictions at a competitive tax rate within the constraint of a balanced budget. In recent years, several states have found it difficult to maintain this standard. This article examines the nature of the problem in the overlapping jurisdictions of New York City and New York State. Specifically, it explains the nature of projected budget gaps that have emerged in New York, and describes how the two New Yorks' political leaders have managed their budgets in recent years.
This article examines the reasons for the observed discrepancy between workers' actual and required levels of schooling and the resulting differences in returns to schooling, "Overeducated" workers are found to be younger and to have lower amounts of on-the-job training than workers with the required level of schooling. They also have higher rates of firm and occupational mobility, characterized by movement of higher-level occupations.
We present survey data challenging the assumption implicit in analyses of labor supply that, all else being equal, workers prefer declining over increasing wage profiles.
No one has derived closed-form solutions for consumption with stochastic labor income and constant relative risk aversion utility. A numerical technique is used here to give an accurate approximation to the solution. The resulting consumption function is often dramatically different than the certainty equivalence solution typically used, in which consumption is proportional to the sum of financial wealth and the present value of expected future income.
Several recent studies have suggested that empirical rejections of the permanent income/life cycle model might be due to the existence of liquidity constraints. This paper tests the permanent income hypothesis against the alternative hypothesis that consumers optimize subject to a well-specified sequence of borrowing constraints. Implications for consumption in the presence of borrowing constraints are derived and then tested using time-series/cross-section data on families from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.
This paper examines Ricardian equivalence in a world in which taxes are not lump sum, but are levied on risky labor income. It shows that the marginal propensity to consume out of a tax cut, coupled with a future income tax increase, can be substantial under plausible assumptions. Indeed, the MPC out of a tax cut can be closer to the Keynesian value that ignores the future tax liabilities than to the Ricardian value that treats future taxes as if they were lump sum.