Juan Carlos Conesa

Intergenerational Policy and the Measurement of Tax Incidence

We evaluate the ability of generational accounting to assess the potential welfare implications of policy reforms. In an intergenerational context policy reforms usually have redistributive, efficiency, and general equilibrium implications. Our analysis shows that when the policy reform implies changes in economic efficiency, generational accounts can be misleading not only about the magnitude of welfare changes, but also about the identity of who wins and who losses. In contrast, the generational accounts correctly identify welfare changes when the policy reform has only a pure intergenerational redistribution component. We illustrate and quantify this issue in the context of widely considered policy reforms (substitution of consumption for labor taxation, and the increase of retirement age) and in a more general context of optimal policy.

Macroeconomic Effects of Medicare

This paper develops an overlapping generations model to study the macroeconomic effects of an un-expected elimination of Medicare. We find that a large share of the elderly respond by substituting Medicaid for Medicare. Consequently, the government saves only 46 cents for every dollar cut in Medicare spending. We argue that a comparison of steady states is insufficient to evaluate the welfare effects of the reform. In particular, we find lower ex-ante welfare gains from eliminating Medicare when we account for the costs of transition. Lastly, we find that a majority of the current population benefits from the reform but that aggregate welfare, measured as the dollar value of the sum of wealth equivalent variations, is higher with Medicare.

The Canadian Productivity Stagnation, 2002-2014

Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth in Canada between 2002 and 2014 has been only 0.16% per year. Although many developed countries have experienced a productivity slowdown since the beginning of the century, this figure is still substantially smaller than that of the U.S. We perform multiple counterfactual exercises to show that this difference in TFP growth cannot be accounted for by several compositional effects and/or mismeasurements of factors of production. We identify two key sectors (Mining and Manufacturing) that drive all of the TFP growth difference with the U.S. Despite the lack of TFP growth, Canada has experienced sustained income growth due to a prolonged period of appreciation of the terms of trade (while terms of trade in the U.S. have deteriorated), making real income in the two countries grow at similar rates.