Summer academic writing

Although my month in Singapore and Vietnam looms, I have begun the first of what I hope will be two articles this summer (probably extending into the fall). Working title: "The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?"

Short answer: no, since it is so hard to specify the optimal generational policy. The big problem, I conclude, is inefficiency. I plan to make use of the under-utilized concept of tax smoothing, extended to the expenditure side, in exploring the gap between optimal and actual U.S. budget policy.

Broadly speaking, this is somewhat familiar ground for me. The impetus comes from (1) a Tax Policy Colloquium session with Alan Auerbach a couple of months back, along with (2) my being invited to present a paper at a conference on generational equity, to be held this fall at the George Washington University Law School. I do hope to break some new ground on both the distributional and efficiency issues, however (more on the latter, since on the former my point is more to discuss how little we know).

My second planned article, which I consider more novel but which timing issues compel me to push back, is "The Current Intellectual State of the Play in U.S. International Tax Policy," a topic on which I have blogged a bit, and on which I gave a talk in Israel last month.