CAREER: Integrated Framework of Political Economy and Government Policy

直到最近，大多数关于公共财政和最优财政政策的研究都是在理想主义环境下进行的，在这种环境下，政府设定税收和转移支付，以最大化一个明确定义的社会目标函数，并承诺随着时间的推移遵循最优选择的政策。尽管这种分析提供了一个有用的基准，但它忽略了现实世界中影响政策制定的政治力量，例如政治团体之间的利益冲突，他们在获得或失去政治权力时改变现有政策的动机，以及选择有利于其选区的政策的愿望。另一方面，政治经济学文献发展了复杂的政治家行为模型，但落后于宏观经济学和公共经济学的现代发展，这些发展将经济主体的激励放在了最重要的位置。当前政治经济模型的另一个限制是，与公共和宏观经济工作相比，它们往往缺乏对政治过程动态的分析，这限制了它们在解决经济政策中许多重要问题方面的范围。本项目所开发的整合框架，弥补了两种文献之间的差距。在这种方法中，每个主体在给定当前政策的情况下做出经济决策，同时也形成对这些政策在未来如何因政治权力的变化而变化的预期。与此同时，政治家评估每项政策的基础是其选区的成本和收益，以及这些政策如何影响他们未来的政治地位。这一分析的重点既在于制定可在政治进程中实施的现实政策建议，也在于了解应如何设计政府机构以减轻政治制约。本项目的主要创新是：(1)建立了政治经济学模型，该模型对具体的制度细节没有什么假设，而是关注关键的政治摩擦；(2)将这些模型与最优税收和社会保险的最先进模型相结合；(3)扩大最优财政政策分析的范围，从纯粹的规范性实践转向考虑政治经济过程的现实建议。该项目与一系列广泛的问题直接相关，包括社会保险（健康、老年和残疾）和税收。它的动机是在政策辩论中经常提出的问题，但很少在学术研究中得到解决。为了确定最重要的政策相关问题，该项目不仅使用分析推理，还使用美国州政府财政数据集，并对其进行实证测试，以确定最重要的摩擦。分析的结果对一系列广泛的经济问题有影响，如社会保障、税法和贸易政策的设计。CAREER奖还资助了一个“政策实验室”的建立，该实验室将汇集麻省理工学院和哈佛大学的本科生、博士生和研究人员，利用经济分析解决财政政策问题。新的博士水平课程和配套的新教科书将允许其他机构将这种新的公共财政方法纳入他们自己的研究生培训计划。

Until recently most of the research on public finance and study of the optimal fiscal policy was conducted in idealistic settings where government sets taxes and transfers to maximize a well defined social objective function and commits to follow the optimally chosen policy over time. Although such analysis provides a useful benchmark, it ignores political forces that affect policy making in the real world, such as conflict of interests among political groups, their incentives to change existing policy as they gain or lose political power, and desire to choose policies that favors their constituencies. On the other hand, the political economy literature develops sophisticated models of the behavior of politicians but lags behind the modern developments in macroeconomics and public economics that bring to the forefront incentives of economic agents. An additional limitation of current political economy models is that, in contrast to public and macro- economic work, they often lack the analysis of dynamics of the political process which limits their scope in addressing many important issues in economic policy. The integrated framework that this project develops bridges the gap between the two literatures. In this approach each agent makes economic decisions given current policies while also forming expectations about how those policies might change in future due to changes in political power. At the same time politicians evaluate each policy based on the costs and benefits for their constituencies and how such policies might effect their political standing in the future. The focus of this analysis is both on the development of realistic policy recommendations that can be implemented in the political process, and on understanding how government institutions should be designed to mitigate the political constraints. The primary innovations of this project are, (1) to develop political economy models that make few assumptions about the specific institutional details but focus instead on the key political frictions; (2) to integrate such models with the state of the art models of optimal taxation and social insurance and (3) to expand the scope of the optimal fiscal policy analysis by moving from purely normative exercise to realistic recommendations that take politico-economic process into account. This project is directly relevant for a broad set of issues, including social insurance (health, old-age, and disability) and taxation. It is motivated by the concerns that are frequently raised during policy debates but seldom addressed in academic research. To identify most important policy relevant concerns the project uses not only analytical reasoning but also assembles a dataset on the US state government finance and empirically tests it to identify the most important frictions. The results of the analysis have implications for a wide set of the economic issues such as design of social security, tax code and trade policy. The CAREER award also funds the establishment of a 'Policy Lab' that will bring together undergraduates, doctoral students, and researchers at MIT and Harvard to address fiscal policy questions using economic analysis. A new doctoral level course with an accompanying new textbook will allow other institutions to incorporate this new approach to public finance into their own graduate training programs.