Martin Feldstein - Böcker

Our current social security system operates on a pay-as-you-go basis; benefits are paid almost entirely out of current revenues. As the ratio of retirees to taxpayers increases, concern about the high costs of providing benefits in a pay-as-you-go system has led economists to explore other options. One involves "prefunding", in which a person's withholdings are invested in financial instruments, such as stocks and bonds, the eventual returns from which would fund his or her retirement. The risks such a system would introduce - such as the volatility in the market prices of investment assets - are the focus of this offering from the NBER. Exploring the issues involved in measuring risk and developing models to reflect the risks of various investment-based systems, economists evaluate the magnitude of the risks that both retirees and taxpayers would assume. The insights that emerge show that the risk is actually moderate relative to the improved return, as well as being balanced by the ability of an investment-balanced system to adapt to differences in individual preferences and conditions.

Written for a non-technical audience, this book summarizes the research on the structure and effects of tax policies collected in "The Effects of Taxation on Multinational Corporations". The book covers such practical issues as the impact of tax law on US competitiveness, the volume and location of research and development spending, the extent of foreign direct investment and the financial practices of multinational companies. In ten succinct chapters, the book documents the channels through which tax policy in the United States and abroad affects plant and equipment investments, spending on research and development, the cost of debt and equity finance, and dividend repatriations by United States subsidiaries. It also discusses the impact of US firms' outbound foreign investment on domestic and foreign economies. Especially useful to non-specialists is an appendix that summarizes current United States rules for taxing international income.

The tax rules of the United States and other countries have intended and unintended effects on the operations of multinational corporations, influencing everything from the formation and allocation of capital to competitive strategies. The growing importance of international business has led economists to reconsider whether current systems of taxing international income are viable in a world of significant capital market integration and global commercial competition. In an attempt to quantify the effect of tax policy on international investment choices, this volume presents in-depth analyses of the interaction of international tax rules and the investment decisions of multinational enterprises. Ten papers assess the role played by multinational firms and their investment in the US economy and the design of international tax rules for multinational investment; analyze channels through which international tax rules affect the costs of international business activities; and examine ways in which international tax rules affect financing decisions of multinational firms.As a group, the papers demonstrate that international tax rules have significant effects on firms' investment and other financing decisions.

The American economy in the 1980s was characterized by a lowering of personal taxes and inflation, spiraling government debt, decreased spending on domestic programmes, and the sharpest post-World War II recession, followed by nearly eight years of strong economic growth. In this study, policymakers in the Reagan administration and academics offer a view of how and why economic policy in the 1980s developed the way it did. The author comments on aspects of policy with which he was closely involved as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (1982-1984): monetary and exchange rate policy, tax policy and budget issues. Feldstein offers his judgments on these policies and illuminates the policy strategies of the 1980s. The following 11 chapters deal with a variety of domestic and international issues, including developments in regulation and antitrust, as well as monetary, trade, tax and budget policies.

The nine papers in this volume exploit the substantial variation in U.S. tax policy during the last two decades to investigate how taxes affect a range of household behaviour, including labour-force participation, saving behaviour, choice of health insurance plan, choice of child care arrangements, portfolio choice, and tax evasion. They also present analytical results on the effects of different types of tax policy.

This volume presents one of the pressing policy issues of the moment: the privatization of social security. While social security encounters enormous fiscal pressure in the face of an ageing population, there has been relatively little published on the fundamentals of essential reform through privatization. The text fills this void by studying retirement benefits in systems based on individual saving in funded accounts. It begins with an introductory paper that argues for reform by overviewing the economic effects of social security and the system's current dire situation. The next chapters investigate how five different countries - Argentina, Australia, Chile, Great Britain, and Mexico - have experienced privatization of their social security systems. The final five papers consider the economics of a privatized social security system in the United States.

This volume presents one of the pressing policy issues of the moment: the privatization of social security. While social security encounters enormous fiscal pressure in the face of an ageing population, there has been relatively little published on the fundamentals of essential reform through privatization. The text fills this void by studying retirement benefits in systems based on individual saving in funded accounts. It begins with an introductory paper that argues for reform by overviewing the economic effects of social security and the system's current dire situation. The next chapters investigate how five different countries - Argentina, Australia, Chile, Great Britain, and Mexico - have experienced privatization of their social security systems. The final five papers consider the economics of a privatized social security system in the United States.

Recent changes in technology, along with the opening up of many regions previously closed to investment, have led to explosive growth in the international movement of capital. Flows from foreign direct investment and debt and equity financing can bring countries substantial gains by augmenting local savings, and by improving technology and incentives. Investing companies acquire market access, lower cost inputs and opportunities for profitable introductions of production methods in the countries where they invest. But, as was underscored recently by the economic and financial crises in several Asian countries, capital flows can also bring risks. Although there is no simple explanation of the currency crisis in Asia, it is clear that fixed exchange rates and chronic deficits increased the likelihood of a breakdown. Similarly, during the 1970s, the United States and other industrial countries loaned OPEC surpluses to borrowers in Latin America. But when the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates to control soaring inflation, the result was a widespread debt moratorium in Latin America as many countries throughout the region struggled to pay the high interest on their foreign loans.This work contains recent work by scholars and practitioners on the experience of capital flows to Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. The papers discuss the role of banks, equity markets and foreign direct investment in international capital flows, and the risks that investors and others face with these transactions. By focusing on capital flows' productivity and determinants, and the policy issues they raise, this collection should prove a useful resource for economists, policymakers and financial market participants.

Social security is the largest and perhaps the most popular program run by the federal government. Given the projected increase in both individual life expectancy and sheer number of retirees, however, the current system faces an eventual overload. Alternative proposals have emerged, ranging from reductions in future benefits to a rise in taxrevenue to various forms of investment-based personal retirement accounts.As this volume suggests, the distributional consequences of these proposals are substantially different and may disproportionately affect those groups who depend on social security to avoid poverty in old age. Together, these studies persuasively show that appropriately designed investment-based social security reforms can effectively reduce the long-term burden of an aging society on future taxpayers, increase the expected future income of retirees, and mitigate poverty rates among the elderly.

Social Security in the United States and in Europe is at a critical juncture. Through essays assembled in "Social Security Pension Reform in Europe", Martin Feldstein and Horst Siebert, along with a number of distinguished contributors, discuss the challenges facing Social Security reform in the aging societies of Europe. A remarkable range of European nations - Germany, France, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Hungary - have implemented or are about to implement mixed Social Security systems that combine a traditional defined benefit of the pay-as-you-go system with an individual retirement account defined contribution of a capital-funded system. The essays here highlight the problems that the European pension reform process faces and how it differs from that of the United States. This timely volume should significantly enrich the debate on pension reform worldwide.

In the Handbook of Public Economics, vol. 5, top scholars provide context and order to new research about mechanisms that underlie both public finance theories and applications. These fundamental subjects follow the recent, steady movement away from rational decision-making and toward more personalized approaches to tax generation and expenditure, especially in terms of the use of psychological methods and financial incentives. Closely scrutinized subjects include new research in empirical (instead of theoretical) public finance, the methods for measuring taxes (both in revenue generation and expenditure), and the roles that taxes play in specific settings, such as emerging economies, urban settings, charitable giving, and among political entities (cities, counties, states, countries). Contributors look at both the "tax" and "expenditure" sides of public finance, emphasizing recent influences that psychology and philosophy have exerted in economics with articles on behavioral finance, charitable giving, and dynamic taxation. To a field enjoying rapid growth, their articles bring context and order, illuminating the mechanisms that underlie both public finance theories and applications.

Editor Raj Chetty is the recipient of the 2013 John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association Focuses on new approaches to both revenue generation and expenditures in public finance Presents coherent summaries of subjects in public economics that stretch from methodologies to applications Makes details about public economics accessible to scholars in fields outside economics

The Field of Public Economics has been changing rapidly in recent years, and the sixteen chapters contained in this Handbook survey many of the new developments. As a field, Public Economics is defined by its objectives rather than its techniques and much of what is new is the application of modern methods of economic theory and econometrics to problems that have been addressed by economists for over two hundred years. More generally, the discussion of public finance issues also involves elements of political science, finance and philosophy. These connections are evidence in several of the chapters that follow. Public Economics is the positive and normative study of government's effect on the economy. We attempt to explain why government behaves as it does, how its behavior influences the behavior of private firms and households, and what the welfare effects of such changes in behavior are. Following Musgrave (1959) one may imagine three purposes for government intervention in the economy: allocation, when market failure causes the private outcome to be Pareto inefficient, distribution, when the private market outcome leaves some individuals with unacceptably low shares in the fruits of the economy, and stabilization, when the private market outcome leaves some of the economy's resources underutilized. The recent trend in economic research has tended to emphasize the character of stabilization problems as problems of allocation in the labor market. The effects that government intervention can have on the allocation and distribution of an economy's resources are described in terms of efficiency and incidence effects. These are the primary measures used to evaluate the welfare effects of government policy.

The first volume of the Handbook of Public Economics contains eight essays on various topics in Public Economics by international leaders in the field. It begins with an historical perspective on the growth of the area as a whole, and subsequent essays focus on the theory and evidence about the impact of taxation on economic behavior. The material presents an up-to-date survey of the field of public economics by those actually doing work on the frontier of the subject, and is written in a manner that renders it useful to the public finance specialist, whilst remaining understandable for the student and non-specialist.