Research Database

Fifty-eight years ago, Harberger (1954) estimated that the costs of monopoly, which resulted from misallocation of resources across industries, were trivial. Others showed the same was true for tariffs. This research soon led to the consensus that monopoly costs are of little significance—a consensus that persists to this day.

This paper reports on a new literature that takes a different approach to the costs of monopoly. It examines the costs of monopoly and tariffs within industries. In particular, it examines the histories of industries in which a monopoly is destroyed (or tariffs greatly reduced) and the industry transitions quickly from monopoly to competition. If there are costs to monopoly and high tariffs within industries, we should be able to see these costs whittled away as the monopoly is destroyed.

In contrast to the prevailing consensus, this new research has identified significant costs of monopoly. Monopoly (and high tariffs) is shown to significantly lower productivity within establishments. It also leads to misallocation within industry: resources are transferred from high to low productivity establishments.

From these histories a common theme (or theory) emerges as to why monopoly is costly. When a monopoly is created, “rents” are created. Conflict emerges among shareholders, managers, and employees of the monopoly as they negotiate how to divide these rents. Mechanisms are set up to split the rents. These mechanisms are often means to reduce competition among members of the monopoly. Although the mechanisms divide rents, they also destroy them (by leading to low productivity and misallocation).

We construct a stochastic overlapping-generations general equilibrium model in which households are subject to aggregate shocks that affect both wages and asset prices. We use a calibrated version of the model to quantify how the welfare costs of big recessions are distributed across different household age groups. The model predicts that younger cohorts fare better than older cohorts when the equilibrium decline in asset prices is large relative to the decline in wages. Asset price declines hurt the old, who rely on asset sales to finance consumption, but benefit the young, who purchase assets at depressed prices. In our preferred calibration, asset prices decline 2.4 times as much as wages, consistent with the experience of the US economy in the Great Recession. A model recession is close to welfare neutral for households in the 20-29 age group, but translates into a large welfare loss of more than 8% of lifetime consumption for households aged 70 and over.

This paper presents a new method for predicting turning points. The paper formally defines a turning point; develops a probit model for estimating the probability of a turning point; and then examines both the in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting performance of the model. The model performs better than some other methods for predicting turning points.

In this paper we develop a theory of how factors interact at the plant level. The theory has implications for (1) the micro foundations for capital-skill complementarity, (2) the relationship between factor allocation and plant size, and (3) the effects of trade and growth on the skill premium. The theory is consistent with certain facts about factor allocation and factor price changes in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Currently, Argentina is experiencing what the government describes as a “great depression.” Using the “Great Depressions” methodology developed by Cole and Ohanian (1999) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002), we find that the primary determinants of both the boom in Argentina in the 1990s and the subsequent depression were changes in productivity, rather than changes in factor inputs. The timing of events links the boom to the currency-board-like Convertibility Plan and the crisis to its collapse. To gain credibility, the Argentine government took measures to make abandoning the plan more costly. Because the government was unable to enforce fiscal discipline, however, these increased costs failed to make the plan more credible and instead made the crisis far worse when it failed.

This paper describes methods for estimating the parameters of continuous time linear stochastic rational expectations models from discrete time observations. The economic models that we study are continuous time, multiple variable, stochastic, linear-quadratic rational expectations models. The paper shows how such continuous time models can properly be used to place restrictions on discrete time data. Various heuristic procedures for deducing the implications for discrete time data of these models, such as replacing derivatives with first differences, can sometimes give rise to very misleading conclusions about parameters. The idea is to express the restrictions imposed by the rational expectations model on the continuous time process of the observable variables. Then the likelihood function of a discrete-time sample of observations from this process is obtained. Estimators are obtained by maximizing the likelihood function with respect to the free parameters of the continuous time model.

This paper examines the sets of feasible allocations in a large class of economic environments in which commitment is impossible (the standard definition of feasibility is adapted to take account of the lack of commitment). The environments feature either memory or money. Memory is defined as knowledge on the part of an agent of the full histories of all agents with whom he has had direct or indirect contact in the past. Money is defined as an object that does not enter preferences or production and is available in fixed supply. The main proposition proves that any allocation that is feasible in an environment with money is also feasible in the same environment with memory. Depending on the environment, the converse may or may not be true. Hence, from a technological point of view, money is equivalent to a primitive form of memory.

Many countries are facing challenging fiscal financing issues as their populations age and the number of workers per retiree falls. Policymakers need transparent and robust analyses of alternative policies to deal with demographic changes. In this paper, we propose a simple framework that can easily be matched to aggregate data from the national accounts. We demonstrate the usefulness of our framework by comparing quantitative results for our aggregate model with those of a related model that includes within-age-cohort heterogeneity through productivity differences. When we assess proposals to switch from the current tax and transfer system in the United States to a mandatory saving-for-retirement system with no payroll taxation, we find that the aggregate predictions for the two models are close.

In models in which convergence in income levels across closed countries is driven by faster accumulation of a productive factor in the poorer countries, opening these countries to trade can stop convergence and even cause divergence. We make this point using a dynamic Heckscher-Ohlin model — a combination of a static two-good, two-factor Heckscher-Ohlin trade model and a two-sector growth model — with infinitely lived consumers where international borrowing and lending are not permitted. We obtain two main results: First, countries that differ only in their initial endowments of capital per worker may converge or diverge in income levels over time, depending on the elasticity of substitution between traded goods. Divergence can occur for parameter values that would imply convergence in a world of closed economies and vice versa. Second, factor price equalization in a given period does not imply factor price equalization in future periods.

We explore the welfare consequences of different taxation schemes in an economy where agents are debt-constrained. If agents default on their debt, they are banned from future credit markets, but retain their private endowments which are subject to income taxation. A change in the tax system changes the severity of punishment from default and, hence, leads to a limitation of possible risk sharing via private contracts. The welfare consequences of a change in the tax system depend on the relative magnitudes of increased risk sharing forced by the new tax system and the reduced risk sharing in private insurance markets. We quantitatively address this issue by calibrating an artificial economy to US income and tax data. We show that for a plausible selection of the structural parameters of our model, the change to a more redistributive tax system leads to less risk sharing among individuals and lower ex-ante welfare.

By the 1970s, quid pro quo policy, which requires multinational firms to transfer technology in return for market access, had become a common practice in many developing countries. While many countries have subsequently liberalized quid pro quo requirements, China continues to follow the policy. In this paper, we incorporate quid pro quo policy into a multicountry dynamic general equilibrium model, using microevidence from Chinese patents to motivate key assumptions about the terms of the technology transfer deals and macroevidence on China’s inward foreign direct investment (FDI) to estimate key model parameters. We then use the model to quantify the impact of China’s quid pro quo policy and show that it has had a significant impact on global innovation and welfare.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

Herein, it is demonstrated that the competitive provision of fiat money is generically either inefficient or infeasible.

In a model which exhibits many monetarist properties it is shown that monetary and fiscal policies must be coordinated. The model is populated by overlapping generations of three-period lived agents who can hold fiat money, fiat bonds, and physical capital. A government produces a public good and issues both money and fiat bonds to finance permanent budget deficits. In this model both fiat money and fiat bonds can have value in equilibrium, and their co-existence can allow a more efficient financing of deficits than can a single debt instrument.

No abstract available.

This paper considers a policy environment in which policy is not set by a single policymaker, but by a sequence of policymaking administrations. Administration turnover is determined by a simple random process. The consequences of administration turnover are traced through for two versions of a linear rational expectations model, and numerical simulations of various policy environments are presented.

This chapter is an introductory essay to the volume Climate Change Economics: The Role of Uncertainty and Risk, edited by V. V. Chari and Robert Litterman. This volume consists of a collection of papers that were presented at "The Next Generation of Economic Models of Climate Change," a conference hosted by the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute at the University of Minnesota.

This paper describes a technique for distributing quarterly time series across monthly values. The method generalizes an approach described by Fernandez (1981). The paper also presents results of a test of the accuracy of these two approaches and two standard procedures suggested by Chow and Lin (1971).

The method proposed here includes two innovations which should improve the accuracy of econometric forecasting. First, it replaces the subjective, judgmental adjustments commonly used with a more formal, objective econometric procedure. Second, it includes a methodology for testing the usefulness of subperiod data which forecasters often inspect when choosing intercept adjustments. A sample application to the MIT-Penn-SSRC Model demonstrates that the procedure is both feasible and potentially helpful in the context of a large macroeconometric model.

This paper surveys implementation theory when players have incomplete or asymmetric information, especially in economic environments. After the basic problem is introduced, the theory of implementation is summarized. Some coalitional considerations for implementation problems are discussed. For economies with asymmetric information, cooperative games based on incentive compatibility constraints or Bayesian incentive compatible mechanisms are derived and examined.

Gali and Rabanal provide statistical evidence that, in their view, puts into question the real business-cycle paradigm in favor of the sticky-price paradigm. I demonstrate that their statistical procedure is easily misled in that they would reach the same conclusions even if their data had been simulated from an RBC model. I also demonstrate that sticky-price models do a poor job generating U.S.-like business cycles with only shocks to technology, the federal funds rate, and government consumption. This explains why Gali and Rabanal need large unobserved shocks to preferences and to the degree of monopoly power.

There is wide variation in the sizes of manufacturing plants, even within the most narrowly defined industry classifications used by statistical agencies. Standard theories attribute all such size differences to productivity differences. This paper develops an alternative theory in which industries are made up of large plants producing standardized goods and small plants making custom or specialty goods. It uses confidential Census data to estimate the parameters of the model, including estimates of plant counts in the standardized and specialty segments by industry. The estimated model fits the data relatively well compared with estimates based on standard approaches. In particular, the predictions of the model for the impacts of a surge in imports from China are consistent with what happened to U.S. manufacturing industries that experienced such a surge over the period 1997--2007. Large-scale standardized plants were decimated, while small-scale specialty plants were relatively less impacted.

We study the importance of international trade in structural change. Our framework has both productivity and trade cost shocks, and allows for non-unitary income and substitution elasticities. We calibrate our model to investigate South Korea’s structural change between 1971 and 2005. We find that the shock processes, propagated through the model’s two main transmission mechanisms, non-homothetic preferences and the open economy, explain virtually all of the evolution of agriculture and services labor shares, and the rising part of the hump-shape in manufacturing. Counterfactual exercises show that the role of the open economy is quantitatively important for explaining South Korea’s structural change.

The data show that an increase in government provided old-age pensions is strongly correlated with a reduction in fertility. What type of model is consistent with this finding? We explore this question using two models of fertility: one by Barro and Becker (1989), and one inspired by Caldwell (1978, 1982) and developed by Boldrin and Jones (2002). In Barro and Becker’s model parents have children because they perceive their children’s lives as a continuation of their own. In Boldrin and Jones’ framework parents procreate because children care about their parents’ utility, and thus provide them with old-age transfers. The effect of increases in government provided pensions on fertility in the Barro and Becker model is very small, whereas the effect on fertility in the Boldrin and Jones model is sizeable and accounts for between 55 and 65% of the observed Europe-U.S. fertility differences both across countries and across time.

Typical incomplete markets models in international economics make two assumptions. First, households are not able to fully insure themselves against country-specific shocks. Second, there is a representative household within each country, so that households are fully insured against idiosyncratic shocks. We assume instead that cross-household risk-sharing is limited within countries, but cross-country risk-sharing is complete. We consider two types of limited risk-sharing: domestically incomplete markets (DI) and private information-Pareto optimal (PIPO) risk-sharing. We show that the models imply distinct restrictions between the cross-sectional distributions of consumption and real exchange rates. We evaluate these restrictions using household-level consumption data from the United States and the United Kingdom. We show that the PIPO restriction fits the data well when households have a coefficient of relative risk aversion of around 5. The analogous restrictions implied by the representative agent model and the DI model are rejected at conventional levels of significance.

We establish that creditor beliefs regarding future borrowing can be self-fulfilling, leading to multiple equilibria with markedly different debt accumulation patterns. We characterize such indeterminacy in the Eaton-Gersovitz sovereign debt model augmented with long maturity bonds. Two necessary conditions for the multiplicity are: (i) the government is more impatient than foreign creditors, and (ii) there are deadweight losses from default; both are realistic and standard assumptions in the quantitative literature. The multiplicity is dynamic and stems from the self-fulfilling beliefs of how future creditors will price bonds; long maturity bonds are therefore a crucial component of the multiplicity. We introduce a third party with deep pockets to discuss the policy implications of this source of multiplicity and identify the potentially perverse consequences of traditional “lender of last resort” policies.

This paper studies the nature of business cycle variation in individual earnings risk using a confidential dataset from the U.S. Social Security Administration, which contains (uncapped) earnings histories for millions of individuals. The base sample is a nationally representative panel containing 10 percent of all U.S. males from 1978 to 2010. We use these data to decompose individual earnings growth during recessions into “between-group” and “within-group” components. We begin with the behavior of within-group shocks. Contrary to past research, we do not find the variance of idiosyncratic earnings shocks to be countercyclical. Instead, it is the left-skewness of shocks that is strongly countercyclical. That is, during recessions, the upper end of the shock distribution collapses—large upward earnings movements become less likely—whereas the bottom end expands—large drops in earnings become more likely. Thus, while the dispersion of shocks does not increase, shocks become more left-skewed and, hence, risky during recessions. Second, to study between-group differences, we group individuals based on several observable characteristics at the time a recession hits. One of these characteristics—the average earnings of an individual at the beginning of a business cycle episode—proves to be an especially good predictor of fortunes during a recession: prime-age workers that enter a recession with high average earnings suffer substantially less compared with those who enter with low average earnings (which is not the case during expansions). Finally, we find that the cyclical nature of earnings risk is dramatically different for the top 1 percent compared with all other individuals—even relative to those in the top 2 to 5 percent.

Today, monopolies inflict great harm on low- and middle-income Americans. One particularly pernicious way they harm them is by sabotaging low-cost products that are substitutes for the monopoly products. I'll argue that the U.S. housing crisis, legal crisis, and oral health crisis facing the low- and middle-income Americans are, in large part, the result of monopolies destroying low-cost alternatives in these industries that the poor would purchase. These results would not surprise those studying monopolies in the first half of the 20th century. During this period extensive evidence was developed showing monopolies engaging in these same activities and many others that harmed the poor. Models of monopoly were constructed by giants in economics and law, such as Henry Simons and Thurman Arnold, to explain these impacts of monopoly. These models are of sabotaging monopolies. Unfortunately, in the 1950s, the economics profession turned its back on this evidence, these models and these giants. It embraced the Cournot model of monopoly, that found in textbooks today. In this model the monopolist chooses its price, nothing more. Gone are the decisions on whether to sabotage substitutes or to employ any of the other weapons at the disposal of sabotaging monopolies. I'll call this Cournot monopoly the toothless monopoly. Using this model, the economics profession has concluded that the costs of monopoly are small. But the toothless monopoly model is ill-equipped to study the "costs of monopoly." By relying on it, the economics profession has made major errors in its study of monopoly.

In this paper, we examine various exchange rate regimes, paying particular attention to what difference the monetary-fiscal policy choices of governments make. The exchange rate may be market-determined or fixed, and if fixed, either cooperatively or by one government alone. Further, capital controls may or may not apply. Our most important result, quite general, we believe, is that absent capital controls the equilibrium exchange rate of the floating rate regime is indeterminate. It makes no sense to advocate floating rates and unfettered international borrowing and lending.

I develop an asset-pricing model in which financial assets are valued for their liquidity—the extent to which they are useful in facilitating exchange—as well as for being claims to streams of consumption goods. The implications for average asset returns, the equity-premium puzzle and the risk-free rate puzzle, are explored in a version of the model that nests the work of Mehra and Prescott (1985).

Many manufacturing industries, including the computer industry, have seen large increases in productivity growth rates and have experienced a reduction in average establishment size and a decrease in the variance of the sizes of plants. A vintage capital model is introduced where learning increases productivity on any given technology and firms choose when to adopt a new vintage. In the model, a rise in the rate of technological change leads to a decrease in both the mean and variance of the size distribution.

We look for the scale effects predicted by some theories of trade and growth based on the dynamic returns to scale that arise from learning by doing, investment in human capital, or development of new products. We find little empirical evidence of a relation between the growth rate of GDP per capita and the measures of scale implied by the theory. Restricting attention to the manufacturing sector, however, we find a significant relation between the growth rate of output per worker and the relevant scale variables. We also find that growth rates are significantly related to measures of intra-industry trade.

We examine the responses of prices and inflation to monetary shocks in an inventory-theoretic model of money demand. We show that the price level responds sluggishly to an exogenous increase in the money stock because the dynamics of households' money inventories leads to a partially offsetting endogenous reduction in velocity. We also show that inflation responds sluggishly to an exogenous increase in the nominal interest rate because changes in monetary policy affect the real interest rate. In a quantitative example, we show that this nominal sluggishness is substantial and persistent if inventories in the model are calibrated to match U.S. households' holdings of M2.

We develop a multicountry model in which default in one country triggers default in other countries. Countries are linked to one another by borrowing from and renegotiating with common lenders. Countries default together because by doing so they can renegotiate the debt simultaneously and pay lower recoveries. Defaulting is also attractive in response to foreign defaults because the cost of rolling over the debt is higher when other countries default. Such forces are quantitatively important for generating a positive correlation of spreads and joint incidence of default. The model can rationalize some of the recent economic events in Europe as well as the historical patterns of defaults, renegotiations, and recoveries across countries.

This paper presents a simple general equilibrium model of optimal taxation similar to that of Lucas and Stokey (1983), except that we let the government default on its debt. As a benchmark, we consider Ramsey equilibria in which the government can precommit its policies at the beginning of time. We then consider sustainable equilibria in which both government and private agent decision rules are required to be sequentially rational. We concentrate on trigger mechanisms which specify reversion to the finite horizon equilibrium after deviations by the government. The main result is that no Ramsey equilibrium with positive debt can be supported by such trigger mechanisms.

We develop a simple dynamic economic model of epidemic transmission designed to be consistent with widely used SIR biological models of the transmission of epidemics, while incorporating economic benefits and costs as well. Our main finding is that targeted testing and isolation policies deliver large welfare gains relative to optimal policies when these tools are not used. Specifically, we find that when testing and isolation are not used, optimal policy delivers a welfare gain equivalent to a 0.6% permanent increase in consumption relative to no intervention. The welfare gain arises because under the optimal policy, the planner engineers a sharp recession that reduces aggregate output by about 40% for about 3 months. This sharp contraction in economic activity reduces the rate of transmission and reduces cumulative deaths by about 0.1%. When testing policies are used, optimal policy delivers a welfare gain equivalent to a 3% permanent increase in consumption. The associated recession is milder in that aggregate output declines by about 15% and cumulative deaths are reduced by .3%. Much of this welfare gain comes from isolating infected individuals. When individuals who are suspected to be infected are isolated without any testing, optimal policy delivers a welfare gain equivalent to a 2% increase in permanent consumption.

This paper develops a simple model of sovereign debt in which defaulting nations are excluded from capital markets and regain access by making partial repayments. This is consistent with the historical evidence that defaulting countries return to international loan markets soon after a settlement, but after varying periods of exclusion.

We propose a definition of involuntary unemployment which differs from that traditionally used in implicit labor contract theory. We say that a worker is involuntarily unemployed if the marginal wage implied by the optimal contract exceeds the marginal rate of substitution between leisure and consumption. We construct a model where risk-neutral firms have monopoly power and show that such monopoly power is necessary for involuntary unemployment to arise in the optimal contract. We numerically compute examples and show that such unemployment occurs for a wide range of parameter values.

Are deflation and depression empirically linked? No, concludes a broad historical study of inflation and real output growth rates. Deflation and depression do seem to have been linked during the 1930s. But in the rest of the data for 17 countries and more than 100 years, there is virtually no evidence of such a link.

In empirical studies of the CAPM, it is commonly assumed that, (a) the return to the value-weighted portfolio of all stocks is a reasonable proxy for the return on the market portfolio of all assets in the economy, and (b) betas of assets remain constant over time. Under these assumptions, Fama and French (1992) find that the relation between average return and beta is flat. We argue that these two auxiliary assumptions are not reasonable. We demonstrate that when these assumptions are relaxed, the empirical support for the CAPM is very strong. When human capital is also included in measuring wealth, the CAPM is able to explain 28% of the cross sectional variation in average returns in the 100 portfolios studied by Fama and French. When, in addition, betas are allowed to vary over the business cycle, the CAPM is able to explain 57%. More important, relative size does not explain what is left unexplained after taking sampling errors into account.

This paper develops the quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model. In a stationary equilibrium the ex ante tax rate on capital income is approximately zero. There is an equivalence class of ex post capital income tax rates and bond policies that support a given allocation. Within this class the optimal ex post capital tax rates can range from being close to i.i.d. to being close to a random walk. The tax rate on labor income fluctuates very little and inherits the persistence properties of the exogenous shocks and thus there is no presumption that optimal labor tax rates follow a random walk. The welfare gains from smoothing labor tax rates and making ex ante capital income tax rates zero are small and most of the welfare gains come from an initial period of high taxation on capital income.

Sovereign debt crises are associated with large and persistent declines in economic activity, disproportionately so for nontradable sectors. This paper documents this pattern using Spanish data and builds a two-sector dynamic quantitative model of sovereign default with capital accumulation. Recessions are very persistent in the model and more pronounced for nontraded sectors because of default risk. An adverse domestic shock increases the likelihood of default, limits capital inflows, and thus restricts the ability of the economy to exploit investment opportunities. The economy responds by reducing investment and reallocating capital toward the traded sector to support debt service payments. The real exchange rate depreciates, a reflection of the scarcity of traded goods. We find that these mechanisms are quantitatively important for rationalizing the experience of Spain during the recent debt crisis.

We construct a competitive model of innovation and growth under constant returns to scale. Previous models of growth under constant returns cannot model technological innovation. Current models of endogenous innovation rely on the interplay between increasing returns and monopolistic markets. In fact, established wisdom claims monopoly power to be instrumental for innovation and sees the nonrivalrous nature of ideas as a natural conduit to increasing returns. The results here challenge the positive description of previous models and the normative conclusion that monopoly through copyright and patent is socially beneficial.

This paper develops a theory of pricing-to-market driven by marketing and bargaining frictions. Our key innovation is a capital theoretic model of marketing in which relations with customers are valuable. In our model, producers search and form long-lasting relations with their customers, and marketing helps overcome the search frictions involved in forming such matches. In the context of international business cycle patterns, the model accounts for observations that are puzzles for a large class of theories: (i) pricing-to-market, (ii) positive correlation of aggregate real export and import prices, (iii) excess volatility of the real exchange rate over the terms of trade, and (iv) low short-run and high long-run price elasticity of international trade flows. The behavior of quantities is shown to be on par with standard international business cycle theories that, in contrast to our model, assume low intrinsic elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods.

Total factor productivity (TFP) differs greatly across countries. In this paper, I provide a novel rationalization for these differences. I consider two environments, one in which enforcement is full and the other in which enforcement is limited. In both settings, manufactured goods can be produced using a high-TFP technology or a low-TFP technology; there is a fixed cost associated with adoption of the former. I suppose that the fixed cost is sufficiently small that adoption takes place in a symmetric Pareto optimum in the limited-enforcement setting. Under this condition, I prove two results. First, adoption takes place in all Pareto optima in the full-enforcement setting. Second, adoption may not take place in a Pareto optimum in the limited-enforcement setting, if the division of social surplus is sufficiently unequal. I conclude that limited enforcement and high inequality interact to create particularly strong barriers to riches (in the language of Parente and Prescott (1999, 2000).

This study argues that both unequal opportunity and social mobility are necessary implications of an efficient societal arrangement when incentives must be provided.

This paper presents a frequency-domain technique for estimating distributed lag coefficients (the impulse-response function) when observations are randomly missed. The technique treats stationary processes with randomly missed observations as amplitude-modulated processes and estimates the transfer function accordingly. Estimates of the lag coefficients are obtained by taking the inverse transform of the estimated transfer function. Results with artificially created data show that the technique performs well even when the probability of an observation being missed is one-half and in some cases when the probability is as low as one-fifth. The approximate asymptotic variance of the estimator is also calculated in the paper.

We present a general equilibrium model of the response of firms' decisions to operate, innovate, and engage in international trade to a change in the marginal cost of international trade. We find that, although a change in trade costs can have a substantial impact on heterogeneous firms' exit, export, and process innovation decisions, the impact of changes in these decisions on welfare is largely offset by the response of product innovation. Our results suggest that microeconomic evidence on firms' responses to changes in international trade costs may not be informative about the implications of changes in these trade costs for aggregate welfare.

The paper studies a fiscal policy instrument that can reduce fiscal distortions without affecting revenues, in a politically viable way. The instrument is a private contract (tax buyout), offered by the government to each citizen, whereby the citizen can choose to pay a fixed price in exchange for a given reduction in her tax rate for a period of time. We introduce the tax buyout in a dynamic overlapping generations economy, calibrated to match several features of the US income, taxes and wealth distribution. Under simple pricing, the introduction of the buyout is revenue neutral but, by reducing distortions, it benefits a significant fraction of the population and leads to sizable increases in aggregate labor supply, income and consumption.