期刊名称:CORE Discussion Papers / Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
出版年度:2008
卷号:1
出版社:Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
摘要:I show in this paper that in an overlapping generations economy with production ¨¤ la Diamond (1970) in
which the agents can only save in terms of capital (i.e. with no asset bubbles ¨¤ la Tirole (1985) or public
debt as in Diamond (1965)), there is a period-by-period balanced fiscal policy supporting a steady state
allocation that Pareto-improves upon the laissez-faire competitive equilibrium steady state (without having
to resort to intergenerational transfers) if there is no first generation or the economy starts there. A transition
from the competitive equilibrium steady state to this other allocation is also Pareto-improving if the former
is dynamically inefficient, but even in the dynamically efficient case if the elasticity of output to capital is
high enough. This intervention allows every subsequent generation to attain, as a competitive equilibrium
outcome, the highest utility attainable at a steady state through the existing markets for the consumption
good and the production factors. The active fiscal policy consists of taxing (or subsidizing, in the
dynamically efficient case) linearly the returns to capital, while balancing the budget period by period
through a lump-sum transfer (or tax, respectively) on second period income. This policy does not finance
any public spending, since there is none in the model. The only purpose of the intervention is to
decentralize as a competitive equilibrium the steady state allocation that maximizes the utility of the
representative agent among all steady state allocations attainable through the existing markets.