Future Rent-Seeking and Current Public Savings
Future Rent-Seeking and Current Public Savings
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未来寻租和当前公共储蓄
DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.1281770
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发表时间：
2008
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
P. Yared
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ricardo J. Caballero;P. Yared
传统观点认为，政客的寻租动机会增加公共债务和赤字。这是因为短视的政治家面临政治风险，更喜欢尽早收取政治租金。这一论点的一个含义是，政府将在繁荣时期储蓄不足，使经济在衰退时得不到保护。这一观点激发了一系列旨在削减赤字和限制借贷的财政规则，以限制这种政治扭曲的规模。在本文中，我们研究了确定政府债务和赤字的动态模型的债务特征的政治扭曲。我们发现，在我们的模型中，传统的智慧总是适用于长期，但只有在短期内，当经济波动性低。相反，当经济波动性高时，寻租政府会沿着相对于仁慈政府的均衡路径过度储蓄和过度征税。讽刺的是，在这种情况下，过度储蓄的偏见也可以通过限制赤字的规则来解决，尽管这一机制是通过对未来租金提取预期的影响而不是通过当前的约束来运作的。然而，这些规则在解决政治摩擦引起的高税收问题上是无效的，在短期内，在高收入波动的情况下，这一问题更为严重。
The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent-seeking motives increase public debt and deficits. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. An implication of this argument is that governments will under-save during a boom, leaving the economy unprotected in the event of a downturn. This view motivates a number of fiscal rules which are aimed at cutting deficits and constraining borrowing so as to limit the size of this political distortion. In this paper we study the determination of government debt and deficits in a dynamic model of debt which characterizes political distortions. We find that in our model the conventional wisdom always applies in the long run, but only does so in the short run when economic volatility is low. Instead, when economic volatility is high, a rent-seeking government over-saves and over-taxes along the equilibrium path relative to a benevolent government. Paradoxically, the over-saving bias can also be solved in this case by a rule of capping deficits, although the mechanism operates through its effect on expectations of future rent extraction rather than though the contemporary constraint. However, these rules are ineffective in solving the high taxation problem caused by the political friction, which in the short run is more acute in the high income volatility scenario.