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Working Paper No.466
08 August 2006
Net Government Expenditures and the Economic Well-Being of the Elderly in the United States, 1989–2001
AbstractWe examine the economic well-being of the elderly, using the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW). Compared to the conventional measures of income, the LIMEW is a comprehensive measure that incorporates broader definitions of income from wealth, government expenditures, and taxes. It also includes the value of household production. We find that the elderly are much better off, relative to the nonelderly, according to our broader measure of economic well-being than by conventional income measures. The main reason for the higher relative LIMEW of the elderly is the much higher values of income from wealth and net government expenditures for the elderly than the nonelderly. There are pronounced differences in well-being among the population subgroups within the elderly. The older elderly are worse off than the younger elderly, nonwhites are worse off than whites, and singles are worse off than married couples. We also find that the degree of inequality in the LIMEW is substantially higher among the elderly than among the nonelderly. In contrast, inequality in the most comprehensive measure of income published by the Census Bureau is virtually identical among the elderly and nonelderly. The main factor behind the degree of inequality, as the decomposition analysis reveals, is the greater size and concentration of income from nonhome wealth in the LIMEW compared to extended income (EI).
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Working Paper No.464
26 July 2006
Differing Prospects for Women and Men
AbstractAlthough elderly men and women share many of the same problems as they age, their lives are likely to follow different courses. Women are more likely than men to live into old old-age and are more likely to spend part of their young old-age caring for husbands or parents. By providing this unpaid care women might enter retirement earlier, rather than prolonging their working lives. Because they live longer, but are less likely than men to live with someone who will care for them, women are also more likely than men to require paid care either at home or in a nursing home. Proposals to reduce government spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will thus have different implications for women and men. This paper evaluates changes in these programs, and describes alternative and innovative ways of providing and paying for eldercare in other countries as well as in the United States.
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Working Paper No.463
25 July 2006
Working for a Good Retirement
AbstractThe choice of retirement age is the most important portfolio choice most workers will make. Drawing on the Urban Institute’s Dynamic Simulation of Income model (DYNASIM3), this report examines how delaying retirement for nondisabled workers would affect individual retiree benefits, the solvency of the Social Security trust fund, and general revenues. The results suggest that delaying retirement by itself does not generate enough additional revenue to make Social Security solvent by 2045. Benefit cuts or supplementary funding sources will be necessary to achieve solvency. However, the size of the benefit cuts or tax increases could be minimized if individuals worked longer. This additional work also substantially increases worker’s retirement well-being. Lower-income workers, to the extent they can work longer, have the most to gain from their additional labor. Policy changes that encourage work at older ages will substantially improve both economic and personal well-being in the future
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Working Paper No.462
24 July 2006
Quick Impact Initiatives for Gender Equality
AbstractThe UN Millennium Project identified a set of Quick Impact Initiatives (QIIs) for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to the Millennium Project, QIIs are interventions to be implemented in the early years of an MDG scale-up strategy that generate rapid results. With adequate resources, they can be implemented quickly (e.g., within three years) without large investments in infrastructure or capacity. This paper suggests some criteria that donors and governments can use to identify such initiatives for gender equality and uses those criteria to develop a broader menu of QIIs for gender equality and women’s empowerment in low- and middle-income countries. It focuses particularly on Quick Impact Initiatives to promote women’s economic opportunities.
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Working Paper No.461
23 July 2006
Wage Growth and the Measurement of Social Security’s Financial Condition
AbstractGovernment spending on the elderly is projected to increase rapidly as the American population becomes older. As a result, many policymakers and budget analysts are concerned about the continued viability of entitlement programs such as Social Security. The Social Security trustees’ economic growth projections receive considerable attention because many people believe that higher growth would significantly improve the program’s actuarial balance (that is, reduce its actuarial deficit). This belief is validated by Social Security trustees’ calculations that show larger 75-year actuarial balances under faster assumed real wage growth rates. Since 2003 the trustees have reported the program’s actuarial balance measured in perpetuity. But they do not provide sensitivity analysis that examines the impact of various assumptions on the infinite-term actuarial balance.
This paper shows analytically that faster wage growth may reduce Social Security’s infinite-term actuarial balance if the ratio of workers to retirees continues to decline rapidly beyond the 75th year. This result holds even if the decline in that ratio ceases after just two decades beyond the 75th year. The paper reports stylized calculations of the impact of real wage growth and demographic change–including time-varying rates of change based on official projections for the US economy–on Social Security’s actuarial balance in a multi-period setting. Finally, the Social Security and Accounts Simulator (SSASIM) actuarial model of Social Security financing is used to estimate the degree to which increased wage growth could negatively affect the system’s infinite-term actuarial balance.
These results raise questions about the conventional wisdom that holds that improved wage growth would affect Social Security’s financing, and how a widely used measure of Social Security’s financing captures those effects.
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Working Paper No.460
22 July 2006
How the Maastricht Regime Fosters Divergence As Well As Fragility
AbstractThis paper investigates the phenomenon of persistent macroeconomic divergence that has occurred across the eurozone in recent years. Optimal currency area theory would point toward asymmetric shocks and structural factors as the foremost candidate causes. The alternative hypothesis pursued here focuses on the working of the Maastricht regime itself, making it clear that the regime features powerful built-in destabilizers that foster divergence as well as fragility. Supposed adjustment mechanisms actually have turned out to undermine the operation of the currency union by making it less “optimal,” that is, less subject to a “one-size-fits-all” monetary policy and common nominal exchange rate, in view of the resulting business cycle desynchronization and related build-up of financial imbalances. The threats of fragility and divergence reinforce each other. Without regime reform these developments could potentially spiral out of control, threatening the long-term survival of EMU.
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Working Paper No.459
21 July 2006
Banking, Finance, and Money
AbstractThis paper briefly summarizes the orthodox approach to banking, finance, and money, and then points the way toward an alternative based on socioeconomics. It argues that the alternative approach is better fitted to not only the historical record, but also sheds more light on the nature of money in modern economies. In orthodoxy, money is something that reduces transaction costs, simplifying “economic life” by lubricating the market mechanism. Indeed, this is the unifying theme in virtually all orthodox approaches to banking, finance, and money: banks, financial instruments, and even money itself originate to improve market efficiency. However, the orthodox story of money’s origins is rejected by most serious scholars outside the field of economics as historically inaccurate. Further, the orthodox sequence of “commodity (gold) money” to credit and fiat money does not square with the historical record. Finally, historians and anthropologists have long disputed the notion that markets originated spontaneously from some primeval propensity, rather emphasizing the important role played by authorities in creating and organizing markets.
By contrast, this paper locates the origin of money in credit and debt relations, with the money of account emphasized as the numeraire in which credits and debts are measured. Importantly, the money of account is chosen by the state, and is enforced through denominating tax liabilities in the state’s own currency. What is the significance of this? It means that the state can take advantage of its role in the monetary system to mobilize resources in the public interest, without worrying about “availability of finance.” The alternative view of money leads to quite different conclusions regarding monetary and fiscal policy, and it rejects even long-run neutrality of money. It also generates interesting insights on exchange rate regimes and international payments systems.
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Book Series
16 July 2006
The Distributional Effects of Government Spending and Taxation
AbstractThis book focuses on the distributional consequences of the public sector. It examines and documents, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of government spending and taxation on personal distribution, that is, on families and individuals. In addition, it investigates the relationship between the public sector and the functional distribution of national income. In this respect, three sides of government activity are encompassed: the beneficiaries of government expenditures such as schools, highways, and police and fire departments; the beneficiaries of government transfer programs; and the bearers of the tax burden.
The book also analyzes government activity on the federal level and looks at the distribution of both the costs and benefits of a single government program such as Social Security.
A key feature is the empirical studies of other countries, including countries of the European Union, Poland, Australia, and South Korea, as well as comparative studies among a set of countries.
The chapters of this volume were selected from papers delivered at Levy Institute seminars and conferences aimed at finding policy options to pressing economic problems.
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Policy Notes No.5
06 July 2006
The Burden of Aging
AbstractDemographers and economists agree that we are aging—individually and collectively, nationally and globally. An aging population results from the twin demographic forces of fewer children per family and longer lives. Most experts recognize the burden that aging causes as the number of retirees supported by each worker rises. This trend is reinforced by the graying of the baby-boom generation, but burdens will continue to rise even after the boomers are buried—albeit at a slower pace.
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Working Paper No.457
19 June 2006
Why Central Banks (and Money) “Rule the Roost”
AbstractSome have argued that a significant decrease in the demand for money, due to financial innovations, could imply that central banks are unable to implement effective monetary policies. This paper argues that central banks are always able to influence the economy’s interest rates, because their liability is the economy’s unit of account. In this sense, central banks “rule the roost.” In the 1930s, starting from Keynes’s ideas and referring to money in general, Kaldor had followed a similar line of analysis. In principle, a new unit of account could displace conventional money and, hence, central banks. But this process meets relevant obstacles, which essentially derive from the externalities and network effects that characterize money. Money is a “social relation.” Money and central banks are the outcome of complex social and economic processes. Their displacement will occur through equally complex processes, rather than through mere innovation.
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Working Paper No.456
18 June 2006
Asset Prices, Financial Fragility, and Central Banking
AbstractThe paper reviews the current literature on the subject in both the New Consensus and Post Keynesian frameworks. It shows that both approaches give to central banks a wrong goal (inflation, distribution, curbing speculation, and so on) and a wrong instrument (interest rate rule). The paper claims that central banks should focus their attention on maintaining financial stability and leave other problems to public institutions better suited for this task. In doing so they should develop new tools of intervention and leave policy interest rates unchanged, close to or at zero percent. Central banks have been created to deal with financial matters (government finance and financial stability) and should stick to this. Central banks, then, have a large amount of improvements to make, both as reformers and as guides for the financial community. Their main instrument should be an analysis of the financial fragility of the financial system and of the different economic sectors. In this context, it is shown that the notion of "bubble" does not matter for policy purposes, and that the current regulatory system lacks an institution that is able to deal effectively with solvency crisis.
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Working Paper No.455
17 June 2006
The Minskyan System, Part III
AbstractThis is the last part of a three-part analysis of the Minskyan Framework. The paper presents a model that studies some of the features presented in Parts I and II. The model is Post-Keynesian in nature and puts a large emphasis on the role of conventions and the importance of the financial side. In doing so, it provides an innovative way to determine aggregate investment and to introduce nonlinearities in the modeling of Minsky’s framework. This nonlinearity relies on the shifting property of conventions and the behavioral and psychological assumptions that they carry. Another specific characteristic of the model is that it is stock-flow consistent and explicitly takes into account the amortization of principal and refinancing loans. All of the modeling is done by using system dynamics, a flexible but rigorous modeling tool that gives the modeler a good understanding of the dynamics of complex models.
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Working Paper No.454
12 June 2006
How Does Household Production Affect Earnings Inequality?
AbstractAlthough income inequality has been studied extensively, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of household production. Economic theory predicts that households with less money income will produce more goods at home. Thus extended income, which includes the value of household production, should be more equally distributed than money income. We find this to be true, but not for the reason predicted by theory. Virtually all of the decline in measured inequality, when moving from money income to extended income, is due to the addition of a large constant–the average value of household production–to money income. This result is robust to alternative assumptions that one might make when estimating the value of household production.
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Public Policy Brief No.85
11 June 2006
The Fallacy of the Revised Bretton Woods Hypothesis
AbstractThe stability of the international financial system is in doubt. Analysis of the system has focused mainly on the sustainability of financing the American trade deficit and has failed to understand the microeconomics of transactions within the system. According to this brief by Thomas I. Palley, the international financial system is unsustainable for reasons of demand, not supply. He recommends a global system of managed exchange rates to replace the current system before it crashes, along with the US economy.
East Asian economies are pursuing export-led growth and running huge trade surpluses with the United States by actively pursuing policies aimed at maintaining undervalued exchange rates. Their governments continue to accumulate US financial assets in order to support and stabilize the international financial system.While East Asian policymakers are correct in their belief that they can improve economic outcomes through exchange rate intervention, the system is undermining the structure of income and aggregate demand and eroding US manufacturing capacity.
Download Public Policy Brief No. 85, 2006 PDF (523.28 KB) -
Working Paper No.453
09 June 2006
The Minskyan System, Part II
AbstractThis is the second part of a three-part analysis of the Minskyan framework. It studies in detail the
Download Working Paper No. 453 PDF (195.25 KB)
dynamics at the root of the endogenous financial weakening of capitalist economic systems. This
part combines the properties presented in part I with other important concepts, such as the
paradox of leverage and conventional expectations, to explain the Financial Instability
Hypothesis. It is demonstrated that the signs of fragility are not always visible and that financial
weakening can take many different (even though well-defined) routes. This is used to draw some
conclusion about the appropriate way to test for this hypothesis and the limit of data. -
Working Paper No.452
08 June 2006
The Minskyan System, Part I
AbstractThis is the first part of a three-part analysis of the Minskyan framework. Via an extensive review of the literature, this paper looks at 12 essential elements necessary to get a good understanding of Minsky’s theory, and argues that those elements are central to comprehend how a monetary production economy works. This paper also shows how important these 12 elements are for the modeling of the Minskyan framework, and how the omission of one of them may be detrimental to an understanding of the essential dynamics that Minsky put forward: the Financial Instability Hypothesis.
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Working Paper No.451
25 May 2006
Time and Money
AbstractTime and money are basic commodities in the utility function and are substitutes in real terms. To a certain extent, having time and money is a matter of either/or, depending on individual preferences and budget constraints. However, satisfaction with time and satisfaction with money are typically complements, i.e., individuals tend to be equally satisfied with both domains. In this paper, we provide an explanation for this apparent paradox through the analysis of the simultaneous determination of economic satisfaction and leisure satisfaction. We test some hypotheses, including the hypothesis that leisure satisfaction depends on both the quantity and quality of leisure-where quality is proxied by good intensiveness and social intensiveness. Our results show that both the quantity and the quality of leisure are important determinants of leisure satisfaction, and, since having money contributes to the quality of leisure, this explains the empirical findings of the satisfactions being complementary at the same time as the domains are substitutes. Interestingly, gender matters. Intra-household effects and especially individual characteristics are more pronounced for women than for men for both domain satisfactions. Additionally, good intensiveness is more important for men (e.g., housing conditions), whereas social intensiveness is more important for women (e.g., the presence of children and participation in leisure-time activities).
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Working Paper No.450
24 May 2006
Extending Minsky’s Classifications of Fragility to Government and the Open Economy
AbstractMinsky’s classification of fragility according to hedge, speculative, and Ponzi positions is well-known. He wrote about fragile positions of individual firms and of the economy as a whole, with the economy transitioning naturally from a robust financial structure (dominated by hedge units) to a fragile structure (dominated by speculative units). In most of Minsky’s writing, he introduced government through its impact on the private sector with its spending and balance sheet operations as stabilizing forces (although he insisted that stability is ultimately destabilizing). On a few occasions he also analyzed the government’s own balance sheet position. More rarely, Minsky extended his analysis to the open economy, examining the fragility of external debt positions. In these works, he analyzed the United States as the "world’s bank" and discussed the impact of various US balance sheet positions on the rest of the world. This paper will carefully examine Minsky’s position on these topics, and will offer an extension of Minsky’s work. It will also examine the "sustainability" of the current "twin US deficits."
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Working Paper No.449
23 May 2006
The Temporal Welfare State: A Cross-national Comparison
AbstractWelfare states contribute to people’s well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of “temporal autonomy”: the freedom to spend one’s time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life. Using surveys from five countries (the United States, Australia, Germany, France, and Sweden) that represent the principal types of welfare and gender regimes, we propose ways of operationalizing the time that is strictly necessary for people to spend in paid labor, unpaid household labor, and personal care. The time people have at their disposal after taking into account what is strictly necessary in these three arenas — which we call “discretionary time” — represents people’s temporal autonomy. We measure the impact on this of government taxes, transfers, and childcare subsidies in these five countries. In so doing, we calibrate the contributions of the different welfare and gender regimes that exist in these countries, in ways that correspond to the lived reality of people’s daily lives.
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Working Paper No.448
22 May 2006
Gibson’s Paradox II
AbstractThe Gibson paradox, long observed by economists and named by John Maynard Keynes (1936), is a positive relationship between the interest rate and the price level. This paper explains the relationship by means of interest-rate, cost-push inflation. In the model, spending is driven in part by changes in the rate of interest, and the central bank sets the interest rate using a policy rule based on the levels of output and inflation. The model shows that the cost-push effect of inflation, long known as Gibson’s paradox, intensifies destabilizing forces and can be involved in the generation of cycles.
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Public Policy Brief No.84
20 May 2006
Can Basel II Enhance Financial Stability?
AbstractEven as the United States enjoys an economic expansion, there is an undercurrent of concern among economic analysts who follow financial markets. Some feel that the expansion of the credit derivatives markets poses the threat of a crisis similar to the Long-Term Capital Management debacle of 1998. Credit derivatives allow banks to share risks with holders of the derivatives, which are often mutual funds and other nonbank financial institutions.The Basel II Accord, now being implemented in many countries, is hailed as a good form of protection against the risk of a series of bank failures of the type that might cause problems in the derivatives markets. Basel II represents a more sophisticated and complex version of the original Basel Accord of 1992, which set minimum capital ratios for various types of bank assets.
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Strategic Analysis
18 May 2006
Can the Growth in the US Current Account Deficit Be Sustained?
AbstractCan the growth in the current account deficit be sustained? How does the flow of deficits feed the stock of debt? How will the burden of servicing this debt affect future deficits and economic growth? President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and Research Scholars Edward Chilcote and Gennaro Zezza address these and other questions in a new Strategic Analysis.
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Working Paper No.447
03 May 2006
Household Wealth and the Measurement of Economic Well-Being in the United States
AbstractThe standard official measure of household economic well-being in the United States is gross money income. The general consensus is that such measures are limited because they ignore other crucial determinants of well-being. We modify the standard measure to account for one such determinant: household wealth. We then analyze the level and distribution of economic well-being in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, using the standard measure and a measure that differs from the standard in that income from wealth is calculated as the sum of lifetime annuity from nonhome wealth and imputed rental-equivalent for owner-occupied homes. Our findings indicate that the level and distribution of economic well-being is substantially altered when money income is adjusted for wealth. Over the 1989–2000 period, median well-being appears to increase faster when these adjustments are made than when standard money income is used. This adjustment also widens the income gap between African Americans and whites, but increases the relative well-being of the elderly. Adding imputed rent and annuities from household wealth to household income considerably increases measured inequality and the share of income from wealth in inequality. However, both measures show about the same rise in inequality over the period. Our results contradict the assertion that the “working rich” have replaced the rentiers at the top of the economic ladder.
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Working Paper No.446
01 May 2006
Feminist-Kaleckian Macroeconomic Policy for Developing Countries
AbstractThis paper reviews evidence of the gender effects of globalization in developing economies. It then outlines a set of macroeconomic and trade policies to promote gender equity. The evidence suggests that while liberalization has expanded women’s access to employment, the long-term goal of transforming gender inequalities remains unmet and appears unattainable without stateintervention in markets. This paper sets forth some general principles that can produce greater gender equality, premised on shifting from economies that are profit led and export oriented to those that are wage led and full-employment oriented. The framework is Kaleckian in its focus on the relationship between the gender distribution of income and macroeconomic outcomes.
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