David Altig

Macroeconomic and microeconomic data paint conflicting pictures of price behavior.

The authors estimate common and nation-specific components of technology shocks, real demand shocks, and combined (common and nation-specific) monetary shocks using quarterly data for Korea and the United States.

This paper uses a new large-scale dynamic simulation model to compare the equity, efficiency, and macroeconomic effects of five alternatives to the current U.S. federal income tax.

This paper proposes a Social Security reform for the United States that gradually, but ultimately fully, privatizes the system.

In this paper, we perform computational counterfactual experiments to examine the quantitative impact of marginal tax rates on the distribution of income.

In this paper, we employ a quantified general equilibrium model to study the effects of changes in marginal income-tax rate structures on the distribution of income.

This paper argues that variations of extant general-equilibrium monetary models are capable of generating real-time economic forecasts comparable in accuracy to those generated under the standard Federal Reserve Board staff methodology.

We examine the efficiency and welfare implications of shifting from a linear marginal tax rate structure to a discrete rate structure characterized by two regions of flat tax rates of 15 and 28 percent.

Indexation of the personal tax code for price-level changes represents one of the most significant elements of U.S. tax legislation in the 1980s.

An examination, using the overlapping-generations approach, of how the interactions between inflation and the nominal taxation of capital income affect the cyclical behavior of the U.S. economy.

A reexamination of the potential costs of anticipated inflation in view of the inflation indexing system established during the 1980s.

We analyze the interest rate and savings effects of fiscal policy in an overlapping generations framework that accommodates two observations.

We show how intergenerational altruism and borrowing constraints shapethe interest rate, savings, and welfare response to funded and unfunded social security programs.

Now that the Fed has started to bumpup the federal funds rate, the explanationoften heard for it is that the Fed is“tightening” monetary policy to keepeconomic growth in check.

The primary objective of most of the world’s central banks these days is to keep inflation low, and the range of inflation rates banks find acceptable appears to be around 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent.

Should the United States care if other countries abandon their own currencies and adopt the dollar?

What do attempts to counterfeit an enemy’s currency during wartime have in common with decisions to adopt another country’s currency during peacetime?

In 2001, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate target more than it had in over 25 years, but long term interest rates didn’t budge. Has monetary policy become ineffective? Just the opposite, the authors argue.

If you buy a lottery ticket, you usually wait to see if you’ve won before going on a spending spree.

By almost any objective measure, Argentina surely stands as one of the outstanding economic success stories of the past decade. Throughout the 1980s, inflation plagued the Argentine economy.

In the late nineteenth century, the economist Thomas Malthus made a simple prediction of economic theory that would result in the discipline being forthwith known as the dismal science.

On certain topics, confusion perpetually reigns. Everyone has a personal list, of course, but somewhere near the top of most is what to make of any debate that includes the words “Social Security.”

Few ideas arise more frequently in monetary policy discussions than the NAIRU, an acronym for the awkward phrase “nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment.”

Fundamental tax reform remains a hot topic, for reasons that should come as no surprise. The current U.S. tax structure is complex, distortionary, and replete with tax preferences.

The quotation above expresses a common, if not dominant, view of the genesis of inflationary pressure in an economy. The story goes something like this: High GDP growth eventually places excessive strain on a nation’s resources.

Just before the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) May 20 meeting, popular opinion about the near-term future of U.S. monetary policy was summarized by John 0. Wilson, chief economist at Bank America Corp.

In an area as contentious as federal budget policy-witness the tortuous road to the just recently settled budget for fiscal year 1996-lawmakers agree about one thing: The Social Security system as we know it is unsustainable in the long run.

In November, the U.S. Congress passed the Balanced Budget Act of 1995. The bill provided a fiscal package that would, according to Congressional Budget Office projections, balance the federal budget by fiscal year 2002.

In the realm of monetary policy, 1994 was an eventful year.

Every so often in the course of public affairs, we reach a defining moment, beyond which our final decisions have the potential to shape legislative and cultural reality for decades to come.

Approaching the halfway mark of fiscal year (FY) 1994, the Clinton administration’s first major piece of budget legislation — the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 (OBRA93) — appears to be a smashing success.

On August 5, the U.S. Senate cleared the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 (OBRA93), one day after the House of Representatives had done likewise.

Virtually all government policies alter the allocation of economic resources.

In mid-February, President Clinton will outline his administration’s first, and much anticipated, economic plan.

Over the past decade and a half, public discussion of U.S. fiscal policy has been dominated by a growing obsession with the level and trend of government borrowing, manifested in federal budget deficits and the outstanding stock of public debt.

Advanced economies are characterized by long-run trends in the level of gross domestic product (GDP) that can be predicted with virtual certainty.

Forecasting short-run economic activity is a tenuous business. Though all economic contractions and expansions have certain well-defined characteristics, history never completely replicates itself.

Saving, so advised the proverbial ant to the spendthrift grasshopper, allows an individual to "prepare today for the wants of tomorrow."

Is the U.S. Social Security system more like a pension plan, wherein Social Security taxes represent a form of premiums for its contributors, or more like a tax and transfer system?