Collaborative Research: The Interplay Between Debts and Entitlements

各级政府的支出决策具有长远的影响。例如，承诺支付大量养老金的政府可能难以履行债务义务。结果可能很严重：例如，在美国，圣贝纳迪诺和底特律等城市已经出现了债务违约。了解积累债务的动机与承诺权利之间的相互作用，对于理解这些实际的和可能的未来事件至关重要。在这个项目中，研究人员使用经济理论来分析债务和权利的政治决定因素以及政府财政义务这两个组成部分之间的关系。尽管有大量关于债务政治经济学的文献和许多关于养老金的论文，但几乎没有研究债务和权利之间相互作用的政治经济学的工作。本项目旨在制定一个新的框架来填补这一重要空白。这项研究对比了资源分配中的债务和应享权利：债务跨时期转移资源，而应享权利则直接针对未来的资源分配。研究者将权利研究引入动态政治经济模型，并分析了权利对债务的影响。该研究还考察了随着政治权力的持续变化或政治制度变得更加不稳定，债务和权利水平如何变化。该项目进一步调查了自上世纪70年代以来政府债务和福利共同增长的决定因素和后果。此外，本研究开发了一种新的方法来评估限制债务和权利增长的财政规则。

Governments at all levels make decisions about spending that have long-term effects. For example, governments committed to large pension payments may have difficulty in meeting debt obligations. The results can be serious: for example, in the United States cities such as San Bernardino and Detroit have defaulted on their debts. Understanding the interplay between the incentive to accumulate debt and to promise entitlements is of crucial importance for understanding these actual and possible future episodes. In this project, the investigators use economic theory to analyze the political determinants of debt and entitlements and the relationship between these two components of governmental, fiscal obligations. Despite a large literature on the political economy of debt and many papers on pensions, there is almost no work that studies the political economy of the interaction between debt and entitlements. This project aims at developing a new framework to fill this important gap. This research contrasts debt and entitlements in resource allocations: debt transfers resources across periods, whereas entitlements directly target the future allocation of resources. The investigators introduce the study of entitlements into a dynamic political economy models, and analyze the impact of entitlements on debt. The research also examines how the levels of debt and entitlements change as the persistence of political power changes, or as the political system becomes more unstable. The project further investigates the determinants and the consequences of the joint growth in government debt and entitlements since the 1970s. Moreover, this research develops a novel way to evaluate fiscal rules that constrain the growth of debt and entitlements.