Burhanettin Kuruscu

Equilibrium Welfare and Government Policy with Quasi-Geometric Discounting

We consider a representative-agent equilibrium model where the consumer has quasi geometric discounting and cannot commit to future actions. We restrict attention to a parametric class for preferences and technology and solve for time-consistent competitive equilibria globally and explicitly. We then characterize the welfare properties of competitive equilibria and compare them to that of a planning problem. The planner is a consumer representative who, without commitment but in a time-consistent way, maximizes his presentvalue utility subject to resource constraints. The competitive equilibrium results in strictly higher welfare than does the planning problem whenever the discounting is not geometric.

Time orientation and asset prices

We analyze a general-equilibrium asset pricing model where a small subset of the consumers/investors have a short-run ‘‘urge to save’’. That is, their attitude toward consumption in the long run is a standard one F they do place zero weight on consumption far enough out in the future F but their short-run effective rates of discount may be negative. Our model, which is an elaboration on the framework proposed by Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer, does not feature time inconsistencies. Thus, we view consumers as fully rational, but subject to specific ‘‘internal frictions’’ in the form of temptation and self-control problems. The model nests the Mehra–Prescott model and we use it as a way of interpreting the wealth and asset pricing data. Some aspects of these data, we argue, can possibly be better understood using our model than the standard one. r 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

Politico-economic consequences of rising wage inequality

This paper uses a dynamic political economy model to evaluate whether the observed rise in wage inequality and decrease in median to mean wages can explain some portion of the relative increase in transfers to low earnings quintiles and relative increase in effective tax rates for high earnings quintiles in the U.S. over the past several decades. Specifically, we assume that households have uninsurable idiosyncratic labor efficiency shocks and consider policy choices by a median voter which are required to be consistent with a sequential equilibrium. We choose the transition matrix to match observed mobility in wages between 1978 and 1979 in the panel study of income dynamics (PSID) data set and then evaluate the response of social insurance policies to a new transition matrix that matches the observed mobility in wages between 1995 and 1996 and is consistent with the rise in wage inequality and the decrease in median to mean wages between 1979 and 1996. We deal with the problem that policy outcomes affect the evolution of the wealth distribution (and hence prices) by approximating the distribution by a small set of moments. We contrast these numbers with those from a sequential utilitarian mechanism, as well as mechanisms with commitment.