Overlapping Generations Framework Research Articles

Does old-age security promote rural residents' consumption? A decomposition based on contribution and replacement rates

Vulnerable groups have low income and face borrowing constraints. What is the effect of pension security on lifelong consumption? Since 2011, China has been piloting old-age security among rural residents, which provides opportunities to study this issue. We numerically simulate the impact of old-age security on rural residents' consumption based on the overlapping generations framework and empirically test the findings. The empirical results show that pension security increases per capita expenditure during the working and retirement periods by 2.04% and 0.91%, respectively. The current excessively high average payment rate (exceeding the numerical simulation threshold of 0.1) has a negative moderating effect on the two consumption periods. The replacement rate, which primarily exhibiting a wealth effect, positively moderates consumption in both periods. Our research has theoretical and practical implications for optimizing social security and promoting welfare among low-income groups.

The transitional impact of state pension reform

We use an overlapping generations framework to evaluate the transitional impact of state pension reform on public and private workers, extending our analysis to all fifty U.S. states. We consider reducing cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs) for retirees and reducing benefit accruals for current workers. The magnitude of reform in each state is calibrated to achieve a common policy goal: the elimination of unfunded pension liabilities within twenty years.Although each reform effectively decreases long run taxes by reducing pension liabilities, variation in fiscal and demographic features creates significant differences in state outcomes. Both reforms yield an asymmetry in welfare outcomes, providing gains to private workers through reduced taxes while causing losses to public workers due to reduced pension income. Wage compensation for affected public workers proves to be a valuable policy instrument for achieving better balance. In the aggregate, state level welfare gains are possible for both reforms.

The environment, life expectancy, and growth in overlapping generations models: A survey

AbstractIt is widely accepted that environmental and demographic changes will significantly influence the future of our society. In recent years, an increasing number of studies has analyzed the interlinkages among economic growth, environmental factors, and a specific demographic variable, namely life expectancy, applying an overlapping generations framework. The aim of this survey is threefold. First, we review the role of life expectancy and pollution for sustainable growth. Second, we discuss the role of intervening factors like health investment and technological progress as well as institutional settings including government expenditures, tax structures, and inequality. Finally, we summarize policy implications obtained in different models and compare them to each other.

Long-term economic implications of Demeny voting: A theoretical analysis

Despite the intense debate over possible correctives to the propensity of contemporary democracies experiencing population aging to favor the elderly, a formal analysis of the long-term economic implications of introducing such correctives is lacking. This paper bridges the gap by modeling intergenerational redistribution policies by the government through a simple overlapping-generations framework with endogenous fertility. An original feature of our model is that the government policy rule is also endogenized because the weight assigned by the government to the well-being of each living cohort in its objective function changes with both the demographic composition of the voting population and the possibility for young adults to exercise their minor children’s voting rights (called Demeny voting). Within this setup, we study the long-term effects of the introduction of Demeny voting on population growth, capital accumulation, output and consumption per capita, and individuals’ lifetime well-being.

Can fiscal incentives to saving alleviate looming old-age poverty?

Abstract We develop a general equilibrium overlapping generations framework with incompletely rational individuals to study old-age saving incentives. Such incentives are used worldwide to help achieve the high savings rate required to sustain sufficient consumption in old age. We show that they raise the welfare of financially illiterate individuals and those with a high degree of time inconsistency. They also reduce the incidence of poverty in old age. We further quantify the fiscal cost, crowd-out, and ability to target the transfers to individuals who need the most. Given the high prevalence of these schemes, our paper has broad policy implications.

Macroeconomic consequences of alternative reforms to the health insurance system in the United States

AbstractThis paper presents a dynamic general equilibrium model designed to examine the macroeconomic effects and welfare implications of alternative reforms to the US health insurance system. Specifically, it scrutinizes the extent to which health care reform can mitigate inefficiencies stemming from market imperfections in the health insurance industry. The model considers a stochastic overlapping generations framework, incorporating heterogeneous agents who are subject to uncertain health shocks. These individuals make optimal decisions regarding labor supply, health insurance, and medical services. Given that the optimal levels of medical consumption and hours worked are endogenous, this setting encapsulates general equilibrium effects. The model is calibrated to US data, and numerical simulations suggest that suitable adjustments to the present health insurance system can broaden coverage and enhance welfare. This improvement is achieved by reducing adverse selection, improving overall health status, and lessening tax distortions on labor supply.

Bounded rationality and optimal retirement age

This paper explores a lifecycle model of labor supply and endogenous retirement behavior for households whose planning window is truncated and who will reoptimize as extra information on productivity is revealed over time. This short horizon model internalizes the restriction on temporal resource allocation, and the labor supply is closely dependent on the degree of productivity changes in view. With the model, the retirement timing—the moment at which the marginal value from the expected resources drops below a threshold—evolves according to the planning window. Using a discrete time overlapping generations framework with leisure substitutability, in which the constraint on time is explicitly added, I demonstrate that the calibrated model economy reasonably replicates the salient facts regarding lifecycle labor supply and retirement behaviors without a borrowing constraint commonly found in models of leisure-consumption substitutability. Furthermore, this result is robust to sensitivity check. With the extended environment of mortality risks and bequests, this paper explicitly quantifies the relationship among retirement age, planning horizon, equilibrium bequests and other lifecycle characteristics from the calibrated general equilibrium.

“CONVENTIONAL” MONETARY POLICY IN OLG MODELS: REVISITING THE ASSET‐SUBSTITUTION CHANNEL

AbstractConventional monetary policy involves actions by the monetary and fiscal authorities: the former sets a nominal interest rate and the latter sets lump‐sum taxes to finance the implied flow of interest payments on government debt. We model such policy within an overlapping generations framework and show that absent any other frictions the magnitude of the nominal interest rate gives rise to asset substitution between government debt and either private debt or capital—substitution that has both real and nominal effects. Such substitution is not in standard New Keynesian models because their dynastic specification implies that government debt is not net wealth.

The public debt multiplier

We study the effects on economic activity of a pure temporary change in government debt and the relationship between the debt multiplier and the level of debt in an overlapping generations framework. The debt multiplier is positive but quite small during normal times while it is much larger during crises. Moreover, it increases with the steady state level of debt. Hence, the call for fiscal consolidation during recessions seems ill-advised. Finally, a rise in the steady state debt-to-GDP level increases the steady state real interest rate providing more room for manoeuvre to monetary policy to fight deflationary shocks.

Educational choice, rural–urban migration and economic development

We develop an overlapping-generations framework of education-based migration that takes place prior to labor-market participation and explore its role for economic development, urbanization and workforce composition. We show that education-based and work-based migration are substitutes and the equilibrium outcome depends crucially on children’s talent distribution, college costs and selectiveness, urban job opportunities, and migration barriers. We establish conflicting partial- and general-equilibrium effects at work for comparative statics, and examine their locational as well as macroeconomic implications for assessing education and migration policies. Applying our model to fit the data from China over 1980–2007, we find that, although education-based migration only amounts to one-fifth of that of work-based migration, it contributes more to per capita output growth than work-based migration owing to its high-skilled nature. Moreover, the abolishment of education-based migration policy and the relaxation of the work-based migration are found to have limited effects on per capita output and urbanization.

A Tale of Two Bases: Progressive Taxation of Capital and Labor Income

Macroeconomic models routinely abstract simultaneously from two features of the US federal tax code: the joint taxation of ordinary capital and labor income and the special taxation of preferential capital income. In this article, we argue that this abstraction omits a “portfolio-effect” mechanism where endogenous changes to the ordinary-preferential composition of households’ capital income influence individuals’ optimal labor and saving decisions through its impact on their effective marginal tax rates. We demonstrate the quantitative importance of this tax detail by simulating provisions from the recently enacted “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” using a heterogeneous-agent overlapping generations framework calibrated to the US economy. Our findings imply that accounting for the detailed taxation of labor and capital income should be considered an important modeling feature for tax policy analysis.

Growth maximizing government size, social capital, and corruption

AbstractOur paper intersects two topics in growth theory: the growth maximizing government size and the role of Social Capital in development. We modify a simple overlapping generations framework by introducing two key features: a production function à la Barro together with the possibility that public officials steal a fraction of public resources under their own control. As underlined by the literature on corruption, Social Capital affects public officials' accountability through many channels which also affect the probability of being caught for embezzlement and misappropriation of public resources. Therefore, in our endogenous growth model such probability is taken as a proxy of Social Capital. We find that maximum growth rates are compatible with Big Government size, measured both in terms of expenditures and public officials, when associated with high levels of Social Capital.

Endogenous Immigration, Human and Physical Capital Formation, and the Immigration Surplus

We evaluate the economic consequences of immigration in a two-country, two-skill, overlapping-generations framework, where immigration, population, human and physical capital formation, and economic growth are endogenous variables. We go beyond extant literature by integrating physical capital in our model. This enables the derivation of new insights about the induced-immigration effects of exogenous triggers, including pull and push factors and policy variables, on the dynamic evolution of the “immigration surplus” in the short run versus the long run, in destination vs. source countries and in the global economy. The policy shifts we analyze include the easing of constraints on potential migrants’ labor and physical capital mobility, and the role of physical capital endowments. We also discuss the policy implications of asymmetries in the net benefits from immigration across destination and source countries. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Interest and Growth

This paper considers the relationship between population growth and capital accumulation. In general, the relationship is not monotonic; there is a tension between two opposing effects: a higher growth rate diluting capital that has already been accumulated, and the ability of a growing population to generate its own wealth. The strengths of these effects depend on the population structure and the time horizon for each generation to accumulate wealth. This type of analysis has been conducted within a natural Overlapping Generations framework. However, an explicit assumption is needed to allow a comparatively static analysis of levels of population growth and capital accumulation. That assumption is effectively the requirement for each generation to be self supporting in terms of its consumption and contribution to production. We show that this assumption can be justified in theory by a form of economic efficiency with respect to population changes, referred to as demographic efficiency. This analysis is also conducted within the Overlapping Generations model of modern economics. An interesting aspect is the structure of “steady state” economies, that is where each consumer is identical to any other through time. With simple examples and assumptions, this paper demonstrates that a given interest rate can support more than one population growth rate (unlike Samuelson’s golden rule, where these rates are equal). The ramifications for non steady state economies are accordingly more complex

Organ donation with vouchers

The ever-increasing shortage of organs for transplantation has motivated many innovative policies to promote the supply of organs. This paper proposes and analyzes a general class of deceased organ allocation policies that assign priority on organ waiting lists to voucher holders to promote deceased donor registration. Priority vouchers can be obtained by self-registering for donation or through family inheritance. In an overlapping generations framework, we find that extending the donor priority benefits to future generations can improve the aggregate donation rate and social welfare. In particular, giving higher priority to voucher inheritors who register for donation is always beneficial regardless of the levels of population growth and care for future generations. By contrast, the efficacy of granting priority to nondonors with inherited vouchers depends on these two sociodemographic factors because of potential free-riding incentives.

Transitioning to a higher retirement age with exponential and quasi-hyperbolic discounters in mixed economies

Abstract This paper analyses the macroeconomic and welfare effects of a higher retirement age within a dynamic overlapping generations framework, wherein exponential discounting and sophisticated quasi-hyperbolic discounting agents coexist in ‘mixed economies’. The transitional dynamics of economic aggregates depend on the proportion of QHD agents, and the extent to which reducing the social security tax rate mitigates crowding-out effects on savings and enables both lower pension contributions and higher pension benefits. Welfare impacts across agent types and cohorts differ accordingly: QHD agents employ the higher retirement age as a commitment mechanism to mitigate the adverse welfare implications of present-biasedness.

AUTOMATION, STAGNATION, AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF A ROBOT TAX

We assess the long-run growth effects of automation in the overlapping generations framework. Although automation implies constant returns to capital and, thus, an AK production side of the economy, positive long-run growth does not emerge. The reason is that automation suppresses wage income, which is the only source of investment in the overlapping generations model. Our result stands in sharp contrast to the representative agent setting with automation, where sustained long-run growth is possible even without technological progress. Our analysis therefore provides a cautionary tale that the underlying modeling structure of saving/investment decisions matters for the derived economic impact of automation. In addition, we show that a robot tax has the potential to raise per capita output and welfare at the steady state. However, it cannot induce a takeoff toward positive long-run growth.

Dynamic Scoring: An Assessment of Fiscal Closing Assumptions

Analysis of fiscal policy changes using general equilibrium models with forward-looking agents typically requires a counterfactual adjustment to some fiscal instrument in order to achieve the debt sustainability implied by the government’s intertemporal budget constraint. The choice of fiscal instrument can induce economic behavior unrelated to the policy change in models where Ricardian Equivalence does not hold. In this article, we use an overlapping generations framework to examine the effects of alternative fiscal closing assumptions on projected changes to economic aggregates following a change in tax policy, assessing the extent to which the bias associated with a particular fiscal instrument can be mitigated. While we find quantitative differences in projected macroeconomic activity across alternative fiscal instruments, these differences tend to shrink as the closing date is delayed. Ultimately, the choice of fiscal instrument becomes relatively unimportant if fiscal closing can be delayed sufficiently into the future.

Endogenous preferences for parenting and macroeconomic outcomes

This paper investigates the effects of parenting time on macroeconomic outcomes and welfare when parenting choices are determined by own childhood experience and social norms in an overlapping generations framework. Parenting time and material expenditures on children generate children’s human capital. When the share of parenting time is relatively low and parenting and leisure are complements or weak substitutes the model has two steady-state equilibria with different welfare levels. In the high-welfare equilibrium parents have stronger endogenous taste for parenting and spend more time with children and less in paid work. Higher productivity due to the higher human capital more than compensates for the reduction in working hours, leading to a higher output level, in comparison to the low-welfare equilibrium.

Investment shocks and inequality dynamics

We explore the dynamics of income and income inequality under asymmetric information in credit markets. Within a stochastic overlapping-generations framework, we study the investment decision of entrepreneurs with heterogeneous abilities. Under information asymmetry, banks do not observe entrepreneurial ability and offer a single pooled loan contract to all entrepreneurs. We show that, following a negative investment shock, the average quality of the entrepreneur pool improves and banks optimally react by lowering the pooled borrowing rate. This reduction in the borrowing rate mitigates the drop in entrepreneurs' income. Consequently, after a negative investment shock, income inequality decreases less compared to the case of full information. Our findings therefore suggest that information asymmetry lessens the fluctuations in income inequality.