Collaborative Research: The Interplay Between Debts and Entitlements

合作研究：债务和权利之间的相互作用

• 批准号: 1559071
• 负责人: Alessandro Lizzeri
• 金额: $ 16.49万
• 依托单位: New York University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-05-01 至 2020-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1559071&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Interplay; Between; Debts

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.

各级政府作出具有长远影响的支出决策。例如，承诺支付巨额养老金的政府可能难以履行债务义务。结果可能是严重的：例如，在美国，圣贝纳迪诺和底特律等城市出现了债务违约。理解积累债务的动机和承诺权利之间的相互作用，对于理解这些实际的和未来可能发生的事件至关重要。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福利之间相互作用的政治经济学的著作。该项目旨在开发一个新的框架来填补这一重要空白。这项研究对比了债务和权利在资源分配上的差异：债务在不同时期转移资源，而权利直接针对未来的资源分配。研究者将权利的研究引入动态政治经济学模型，并分析了权利对债务的影响。这项研究还考察了随着政治权力的持续性变化，或随着政治体系变得更加不稳定，债务和福利水平如何变化。该项目进一步调查了自1970年代以来政府债务和应享权利共同增长的决定因素和后果。此外，这项研究开发了一种新的方法来评估限制债务和福利增长的财政规则。