Laurence J Kotlikoff
Biographic Data
| ID | 703171 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laurence J Kotlikoff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laurence J |
| FAMILY NAME | Kotlikoff |
| SIGNATURE | KOTLIKOFF L J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 299 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Public economic gains from tax-financed investments in childhood immunization in the United States
The emergence of COVID-19 has displayed the importance of immunization and the need for continued public investment in vaccination programs. Globally, national vaccination programs rely heavily on tax-financed expenditure, requiring upfront investments and ongoing financial commitments. To evaluate annual public investments, we conducted a fiscal analysis that quantifies the public economic consequences to government in the United States attribut…
Reconstructing the Fairtax's Deconstruction
Fundamental Tax Reform Is Urgently Needed
The U.S. fiscal system is unfair, distortionary, complex, and insolvent. It's undermining our nation's social cohesion, mobility, economic performance, and financial sustainability. Unfortunately, piecemeal solutions won't suffice. Our entire fiscal operation needs immediate, radical reform. Few Americans, including few of our nation's leaders, appear to comprehend our country's true fiscal condition. No surprise. The system comprises a vast arra…
US Inequality and Fiscal Progressivity: An Intragenerational Accounting
This study measures inequality and fiscal progressivity. It differs from prior such analyses by measuring inequality based on remaining lifetime spending rather than particular resources, like wealth and current income, that only partially determine lifetime spending, and by considering inequality and progressivity within generations. To estimate the distribution of remaining lifetime spending, we run the 2016 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer F…
Will the Paris Accord Accelerate Climate Change
The 2015 Paris climate accord (Paris Agreement) is meant to control our planet’s rising temperature to limit climate change. But it may be doing the opposite in permitting a slow phase-in of CO2 emission mitigation. The accord asks its 195 national signatories to specify their emission reductions and to raise those contributions over time. However, there is no mechanism to enforce these pledges. This said, the accord puts dirty energy producers o…
Get what's yours: The secrets to maxing out your Social Security revised and updated
In 2016, Social Security rules changed radically. Do you know how - and how these changes might apply to you? Americans have left literally billions of Social Security dollars on the table - benefits we have earned, are eligible to take, but simply aren't aware of. Fully revised and carefully updated in light of the new law, Get What's Yours is the indispensable guide to collecting the maximum Social Security benefits possible."--Page [4] of cove…
Limited-Purpose Banking—Moving from “Trust Me” to “Show Me” Banking
There are many alleged culprits for the bank runs of 2008 and their devastating economic fallout. But proprietary information and leverage top our list. Claims of proprietary information forced financial markets to operate on trust, while providing the perfect breeding ground for fraud. And leverage permitted creditors to run at the first whiff of fraud, leveling one financial giant after another. Limited Purpose Banking (LPB), presented here, is…
The Role of Immigration in Dealing with the Developed World's Demographic Transition
This paper develops a three-region dynamic general-equilibrium life-cycle model to analyze general and skill-specific immigration policy in the U.S., Japan, and the E.U. Immigration is often offered as a solution to the remarkable demographic transition underway in the developed world. However, the precise net impact of expanded immigration is quite unclear. Additional immigrants pay taxes, but they also require public goods and become eligible f…
Generational Policy
How generational policy affects the sustainability of a government's fiscal policy. In these eight 2002 Cairoli Lectures, presented at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Laurence Kotlikoff shows how generational policy works, how it is measured, and how much it matters. Kotlikoff discusses the incidence and measurement of generational policy, the relationship of generational policy to monetary policy, and the vacuity of…
Generational Accounting in the UK
This paper presents the first set of generational accounts for the United Kingdom. We find that under our baseline scenario, in which pensions are price indexed and health expenditure grows modestly, the imbalance in UK generational policy is small when compared with other leading industrial countries like the United States, Japan, and Germany. However, under an alternative policy scenario, where all social benefits are wage‐indexed and health ca…
The Degeneration of EMU
From conception through gestation and birth, and now in its early infancy, the euro has consistently proved the skeptics wrong. Some Cassandras thought that Brussels-bashing nationalists would reject the single currency in referendums. Others doubted that Italy and other fiscally troubled applicants would fulfill the Maastricht Treaty's strict limits on budget deficits and national debt. Still others predicted that the fierce 1998 dispute over th…
Parental Altruism and Inter Vivos Transfers: Theory and Evidence
This paper uses Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism. Specifically, the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one-dollar reduction in that child's income results in a one-dollar increase in the parents' transfer to the child. The authors find that redist…
Generational Accounting: A Meaningful Way to Evaluate Fiscal Policy
This paper illustrates the technique of generational accounting, a new way to evaluate fiscal policy that overcomes the inherent ambiguities of traditional deficit accounting. The authors illustrate why there is no 'correct' measure of the deficit and how generational accounting--estimating the fiscal burdens current policy places on different generations--provides a clearer picture of the intergenerational and macroeconomic effects of fiscal pol…
Passing the generational buck
The Wage Carrot and the Pension Stick: Retirement Benefits and Labor Force Participation
Kotlikoff and Wise document the continued backloading of pension benefits and the extent of retirement incentives by examining pension accrual in over 1,500 companies with defined benefit plans. They also perform a detailed analysis on the retirement plan of a Fortune 500 company
A Strategic Altruism Model in Which Ricardian Equivalence Does Not Hold
Journal Article A Strategic Altruism Model in Which Ricardian Equivalence Does Not Hold Get access Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Laurence J. Kotlikoff Boston University and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Assaf Razin, Assaf Razin Tel Aviv University and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert W. Rosenthal Robert W. Rosenthal Boston University Search for other work…
The Incidence and Efficiency Costs of Corporate Taxation When Corporate and Noncorporate Firms Produce the Same Good
One difficulty confronting Arnold C. Harberger's celebrated model of the corporate income tax is how to treat noncorporate production in primarily corporate sectors and corporate production in primarily noncorporate sectors. This paper presents a two-good model with corporate and noncorporate production of both goods. The incidence of corporate tax in the authors' mutual production model can differ markedly from that in the Harberger model. The d…
Dynamic Fiscal Policy
Dynamic Fiscal Policy
Journal Article Dynamic Fiscal Policy Get access Dynamic Fiscal Policy. BY ALAN J. AUERBACH and LAURENCE J. KOTLIKOFF. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xv+196. £19.50, US$32.50 hardback. ISBN 0 521 30041 X.) Ian Walker Ian Walker Manchester University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 98, Issue 392, 1 September 1988, Pages 873–874, https://doi.org/10.2307/2233935…
Intergenerational Transfers and Savings
What is the main explanation for savings? Is it primarily accumulation for retirement as claimed by Albert Ando, Richard Brumberg, and Franco Modigliani in their celebrated Life Cycle Model of Savings? Is it primarily intentional accumulation for intergenerational transfers? Or is it primarily precautionary savings, much of which may be bequeathed because of imperfections in annuity markets? The answer to the savings puzzle has many policy implic…
Justifying Public Provision of Social Security
The enormous expansion of the Social Security system over the last four decades has left the government very heavily involved in determining the savings and insurance of American households. While the growth of Social Security has been very substantial, it has also been gradual; this may explain the lack of focused debate on the pros and cons of government intervention in private saving and insurance decisions. This paper discusses the rationale …
Pensions in the American Economy
Taxation and Savings - A Neoclassical Perspective
This paper discusses recent neoclassical analyses of taxation and savings.Contrary to the popular view that fiscal policy has highly ambiguous impacts on savings, neoclassical models admit a host of policies with clear and potentially quite powerful affects on the accumulation of wealth.The paper considers four fundamental types of fiscal policies and compares their quantitative affect on savings.The essential elements of these policies involve i…
The Family as an Incomplete Annuities Market
Families can self-insure against uncertain dates of death through implicit or explicit agreements with respect to consumption and interfamily transfers. Interfamily transfers need have nothing to do with altruistic feelings; they may simply reflect risk-sharing behavior of completely selfish family members. Although family annuity markets are incomplete, even small families can substitute by more than 70 percent for perfect market annuities. Give…
The Role of Intergenerational Transfers in Aggregate Capital Accumulation
This paper uses historical U.S. data to directly estimate the contribution of intergenerational transfers to aggregate capital accumulation. The evidence presented indicates that intergenerational transfers account for the vast majority of aggregate U.S. capital formation; only a negligible fraction of actual capital accumulation can be traced to life-cycle or "hump" savings. A major difference between this study and previous investigations of th…
Parental Altruism and Inter Vivos Transfers: Theory and Evidence
This paper uses Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism. Specifically, the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one-dollar reduction in that child's income results in a one-dollar increase in the parents' transfer to the child. The authors find that redist…
The Role of Intergenerational Transfers in Aggregate Capital Accumulation
This paper uses historical U.S. data to directly estimate the contribution of intergenerational transfers to aggregate capital accumulation. The evidence presented indicates that intergenerational transfers account for the vast majority of aggregate U.S. capital formation; only a negligible fraction of actual capital accumulation can be traced to life-cycle or "hump" savings. A major difference between this study and previous investigations of th…
The Family as an Incomplete Annuities Market
Families can self-insure against uncertain dates of death through implicit or explicit agreements with respect to consumption and interfamily transfers. Interfamily transfers need have nothing to do with altruistic feelings; they may simply reflect risk-sharing behavior of completely selfish family members. Although family annuity markets are incomplete, even small families can substitute by more than 70 percent for perfect market annuities. Give…
The Structure of Slave Prices in New Orleans, 1804 to 1862
This paper analyzes the structure of slave prices in New Orleans from 1804 to 1862 in an attempt to shed light on such issues as the competitive nature and economic “rationality” of the slave system, the impact of the slave trade on the separation of the slave family, the extent of slave skill formation and its importance to the Southern economy, and the personal relationships between owners and slaves. The analysis is based on the Rogert Fogel a…
Intergenerational Transfers and Savings
What is the main explanation for savings? Is it primarily accumulation for retirement as claimed by Albert Ando, Richard Brumberg, and Franco Modigliani in their celebrated Life Cycle Model of Savings? Is it primarily intentional accumulation for intergenerational transfers? Or is it primarily precautionary savings, much of which may be bequeathed because of imperfections in annuity markets? The answer to the savings puzzle has many policy implic…
Generational Accounting: A Meaningful Way to Evaluate Fiscal Policy
This paper illustrates the technique of generational accounting, a new way to evaluate fiscal policy that overcomes the inherent ambiguities of traditional deficit accounting. The authors illustrate why there is no 'correct' measure of the deficit and how generational accounting--estimating the fiscal burdens current policy places on different generations--provides a clearer picture of the intergenerational and macroeconomic effects of fiscal pol…
Generational Accounting in the UK
This paper presents the first set of generational accounts for the United Kingdom. We find that under our baseline scenario, in which pensions are price indexed and health expenditure grows modestly, the imbalance in UK generational policy is small when compared with other leading industrial countries like the United States, Japan, and Germany. However, under an alternative policy scenario, where all social benefits are wage‐indexed and health ca…
Justifying Public Provision of Social Security
The enormous expansion of the Social Security system over the last four decades has left the government very heavily involved in determining the savings and insurance of American households. While the growth of Social Security has been very substantial, it has also been gradual; this may explain the lack of focused debate on the pros and cons of government intervention in private saving and insurance decisions. This paper discusses the rationale …
The Old South's Stake in the Inter-Regional Movement of Slaves, 1850–1860
The Old South's economic stake in western land expansion and slave migration is examined in a two-region, general equilibrium model of slave mobility. The model separates the effect on the Old South's assets and slave population of more western land from that of slave sales per se. The authors conclude that the Old South had no economic stake in the New South. The most conservative estimate reveals that a doubling of western lands in 1850 would h…
The Incidence of a Tax on Pure Rent: A New (?) Reason for an Old Answer
The Degeneration of EMU
From conception through gestation and birth, and now in its early infancy, the euro has consistently proved the skeptics wrong. Some Cassandras thought that Brussels-bashing nationalists would reject the single currency in referendums. Others doubted that Italy and other fiscally troubled applicants would fulfill the Maastricht Treaty's strict limits on budget deficits and national debt. Still others predicted that the fierce 1998 dispute over th…
Taxation and Savings - A Neoclassical Perspective
This paper discusses recent neoclassical analyses of taxation and savings.Contrary to the popular view that fiscal policy has highly ambiguous impacts on savings, neoclassical models admit a host of policies with clear and potentially quite powerful affects on the accumulation of wealth.The paper considers four fundamental types of fiscal policies and compares their quantitative affect on savings.The essential elements of these policies involve i…
A Strategic Altruism Model in Which Ricardian Equivalence Does Not Hold
Journal Article A Strategic Altruism Model in Which Ricardian Equivalence Does Not Hold Get access Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Laurence J. Kotlikoff Boston University and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Assaf Razin, Assaf Razin Tel Aviv University and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert W. Rosenthal Robert W. Rosenthal Boston University Search for other work…
The Incidence and Efficiency Costs of Corporate Taxation When Corporate and Noncorporate Firms Produce the Same Good
One difficulty confronting Arnold C. Harberger's celebrated model of the corporate income tax is how to treat noncorporate production in primarily corporate sectors and corporate production in primarily noncorporate sectors. This paper presents a two-good model with corporate and noncorporate production of both goods. The incidence of corporate tax in the authors' mutual production model can differ markedly from that in the Harberger model. The d…
Dynamic Fiscal Policy
Journal Article Dynamic Fiscal Policy Get access Dynamic Fiscal Policy. BY ALAN J. AUERBACH and LAURENCE J. KOTLIKOFF. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xv+196. £19.50, US$32.50 hardback. ISBN 0 521 30041 X.) Ian Walker Ian Walker Manchester University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 98, Issue 392, 1 September 1988, Pages 873–874, https://doi.org/10.2307/2233935…
The Old South's Stake in the Inter-Regional Movement of Slaves, 1850–1860
The Old South's economic stake in western land expansion and slave migration is examined in a two-region, general equilibrium model of slave mobility. The model separates the effect on the Old South's assets and slave population of more western land from that of slave sales per se. The authors conclude that the Old South had no economic stake in the New South. The most conservative estimate reveals that a doubling of western lands in 1850 would h…
The Incidence of a Tax on Pure Rent: A New (?) Reason for an Old Answer
The Structure of Slave Prices in New Orleans, 1804 to 1862
This paper analyzes the structure of slave prices in New Orleans from 1804 to 1862 in an attempt to shed light on such issues as the competitive nature and economic “rationality” of the slave system, the impact of the slave trade on the separation of the slave family, the extent of slave skill formation and its importance to the Southern economy, and the personal relationships between owners and slaves. The analysis is based on the Rogert Fogel a…
The Family as an Incomplete Annuities Market
Families can self-insure against uncertain dates of death through implicit or explicit agreements with respect to consumption and interfamily transfers. Interfamily transfers need have nothing to do with altruistic feelings; they may simply reflect risk-sharing behavior of completely selfish family members. Although family annuity markets are incomplete, even small families can substitute by more than 70 percent for perfect market annuities. Give…
The Role of Intergenerational Transfers in Aggregate Capital Accumulation
This paper uses historical U.S. data to directly estimate the contribution of intergenerational transfers to aggregate capital accumulation. The evidence presented indicates that intergenerational transfers account for the vast majority of aggregate U.S. capital formation; only a negligible fraction of actual capital accumulation can be traced to life-cycle or "hump" savings. A major difference between this study and previous investigations of th…
Taxation and Savings - A Neoclassical Perspective
This paper discusses recent neoclassical analyses of taxation and savings.Contrary to the popular view that fiscal policy has highly ambiguous impacts on savings, neoclassical models admit a host of policies with clear and potentially quite powerful affects on the accumulation of wealth.The paper considers four fundamental types of fiscal policies and compares their quantitative affect on savings.The essential elements of these policies involve i…
Pensions in the American Economy
Justifying Public Provision of Social Security
The enormous expansion of the Social Security system over the last four decades has left the government very heavily involved in determining the savings and insurance of American households. While the growth of Social Security has been very substantial, it has also been gradual; this may explain the lack of focused debate on the pros and cons of government intervention in private saving and insurance decisions. This paper discusses the rationale …
Dynamic Fiscal Policy
Journal Article Dynamic Fiscal Policy Get access Dynamic Fiscal Policy. BY ALAN J. AUERBACH and LAURENCE J. KOTLIKOFF. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xv+196. £19.50, US$32.50 hardback. ISBN 0 521 30041 X.) Ian Walker Ian Walker Manchester University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 98, Issue 392, 1 September 1988, Pages 873–874, https://doi.org/10.2307/2233935…
Intergenerational Transfers and Savings
What is the main explanation for savings? Is it primarily accumulation for retirement as claimed by Albert Ando, Richard Brumberg, and Franco Modigliani in their celebrated Life Cycle Model of Savings? Is it primarily intentional accumulation for intergenerational transfers? Or is it primarily precautionary savings, much of which may be bequeathed because of imperfections in annuity markets? The answer to the savings puzzle has many policy implic…
The Incidence and Efficiency Costs of Corporate Taxation When Corporate and Noncorporate Firms Produce the Same Good
One difficulty confronting Arnold C. Harberger's celebrated model of the corporate income tax is how to treat noncorporate production in primarily corporate sectors and corporate production in primarily noncorporate sectors. This paper presents a two-good model with corporate and noncorporate production of both goods. The incidence of corporate tax in the authors' mutual production model can differ markedly from that in the Harberger model. The d…
Dynamic Fiscal Policy
A Strategic Altruism Model in Which Ricardian Equivalence Does Not Hold
Journal Article A Strategic Altruism Model in Which Ricardian Equivalence Does Not Hold Get access Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Laurence J. Kotlikoff Boston University and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Assaf Razin, Assaf Razin Tel Aviv University and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert W. Rosenthal Robert W. Rosenthal Boston University Search for other work…
The Wage Carrot and the Pension Stick: Retirement Benefits and Labor Force Participation
Kotlikoff and Wise document the continued backloading of pension benefits and the extent of retirement incentives by examining pension accrual in over 1,500 companies with defined benefit plans. They also perform a detailed analysis on the retirement plan of a Fortune 500 company
Generational Accounting: A Meaningful Way to Evaluate Fiscal Policy
This paper illustrates the technique of generational accounting, a new way to evaluate fiscal policy that overcomes the inherent ambiguities of traditional deficit accounting. The authors illustrate why there is no 'correct' measure of the deficit and how generational accounting--estimating the fiscal burdens current policy places on different generations--provides a clearer picture of the intergenerational and macroeconomic effects of fiscal pol…
Passing the generational buck
Parental Altruism and Inter Vivos Transfers: Theory and Evidence
This paper uses Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism. Specifically, the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one-dollar reduction in that child's income results in a one-dollar increase in the parents' transfer to the child. The authors find that redist…
Generational Accounting in the UK
This paper presents the first set of generational accounts for the United Kingdom. We find that under our baseline scenario, in which pensions are price indexed and health expenditure grows modestly, the imbalance in UK generational policy is small when compared with other leading industrial countries like the United States, Japan, and Germany. However, under an alternative policy scenario, where all social benefits are wage‐indexed and health ca…
The Degeneration of EMU
From conception through gestation and birth, and now in its early infancy, the euro has consistently proved the skeptics wrong. Some Cassandras thought that Brussels-bashing nationalists would reject the single currency in referendums. Others doubted that Italy and other fiscally troubled applicants would fulfill the Maastricht Treaty's strict limits on budget deficits and national debt. Still others predicted that the fierce 1998 dispute over th…
Generational Policy
How generational policy affects the sustainability of a government's fiscal policy. In these eight 2002 Cairoli Lectures, presented at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Laurence Kotlikoff shows how generational policy works, how it is measured, and how much it matters. Kotlikoff discusses the incidence and measurement of generational policy, the relationship of generational policy to monetary policy, and the vacuity of…
The Role of Immigration in Dealing with the Developed World's Demographic Transition
This paper develops a three-region dynamic general-equilibrium life-cycle model to analyze general and skill-specific immigration policy in the U.S., Japan, and the E.U. Immigration is often offered as a solution to the remarkable demographic transition underway in the developed world. However, the precise net impact of expanded immigration is quite unclear. Additional immigrants pay taxes, but they also require public goods and become eligible f…
Limited-Purpose Banking—Moving from “Trust Me” to “Show Me” Banking
There are many alleged culprits for the bank runs of 2008 and their devastating economic fallout. But proprietary information and leverage top our list. Claims of proprietary information forced financial markets to operate on trust, while providing the perfect breeding ground for fraud. And leverage permitted creditors to run at the first whiff of fraud, leveling one financial giant after another. Limited Purpose Banking (LPB), presented here, is…
Get what's yours: The secrets to maxing out your Social Security revised and updated
In 2016, Social Security rules changed radically. Do you know how - and how these changes might apply to you? Americans have left literally billions of Social Security dollars on the table - benefits we have earned, are eligible to take, but simply aren't aware of. Fully revised and carefully updated in light of the new law, Get What's Yours is the indispensable guide to collecting the maximum Social Security benefits possible."--Page [4] of cove…
Will the Paris Accord Accelerate Climate Change
The 2015 Paris climate accord (Paris Agreement) is meant to control our planet’s rising temperature to limit climate change. But it may be doing the opposite in permitting a slow phase-in of CO2 emission mitigation. The accord asks its 195 national signatories to specify their emission reductions and to raise those contributions over time. However, there is no mechanism to enforce these pledges. This said, the accord puts dirty energy producers o…
US Inequality and Fiscal Progressivity: An Intragenerational Accounting
This study measures inequality and fiscal progressivity. It differs from prior such analyses by measuring inequality based on remaining lifetime spending rather than particular resources, like wealth and current income, that only partially determine lifetime spending, and by considering inequality and progressivity within generations. To estimate the distribution of remaining lifetime spending, we run the 2016 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer F…
Economics (26 works) · Financial Literacy, Pension, Retirement Analysis (11 works) · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Business (7 works) · Microeconomics (7 works) · Public economics (7 works) · Finance (6 works) · Fiscal policy (6 works) · Labour economics (6 works)