转移支付社会保障和宏观经济外文文献翻译.docx

1、转移支付社会保障和宏观经济外文文献翻译转移支付、社会保障和宏观经济中英文2016英文Transfer Payments and the Macroeconomy: The Effects of Social Security Benefit Increases, 19521991Christina Romer, David RomerThis paper uses Social Security benefit increases from 1952 to 1991 to investigate the macroeconomic effects of changes in transfers

2、. It finds a large, immediate, and significant positive response of consumption to permanent benefit increases. The response declines after about five months, and does not appear to spread to industrial production or employment. The effects of transfers are faster, but much less persistent and much

3、smaller overall, than those of tax changes. Finally, monetary policy responds strongly to benefit increases but not to tax changes. This may account for the failure of the effects of transfers to persist or spread.Government transfer payments are the relative unknowns of fiscal policy. There have be

4、en many studies of the short-run macroeconomic effects of changes in government purchases and taxes, but much less research has been done on the aggregate impacts of transfer payments. Yet such payments are substantial. In the United States today, for example, federal transfer payments account for a

5、bout 15percent of GDP and more than 40 percent of federal spending. This paper takes a step toward filling this gap in our knowledge by examining the macroeconomic impact of increases in Social Security benefits in the United States from 1952 to 1991. For much of the postwar period, increases in Soc

6、ial Security benefits occurred somewhat randomly. The generosity of the program was expanded in several steps during the 1950s and 1960s. Until 1974, cost-of-living increases were not automatic, but were legislated at irregular intervals. And from 1975 until the early 1990s, substantial variation in

7、 inflation and occasional bursts of retroactive payments resulting from idiosyncratic factors, as well as a legislated change in the timing of cost-of-living adjustments, led to irregular and variable benefit changes. This variation makes Social Security benefit increases a potentially fruitful wind

8、ow into the macroeconomic effects of transfers.We use documents from the Social Security Administration, Congress, and the executive branch to identify the nature, motivation, timing, and size of benefit increases over these decades. This narrative analysis allows us to focus on increases that raise

9、d payments to existing beneficiaries, to exclude the few increases that were explicitly made for countercyclical purposes, and to separate permanent and temporary changes.We then estimate how aggregate consumer spending responds to these relatively exogenous increases in Social Security benefits. We

10、 find that permanent benefit increases have a roughly one-for-one impact on consumer spending in the month the larger checks arrive, and that this effect is highly statistically significant. The effect persists for roughly half a year and then appears to wane sharplythough the standard errors become

11、 large at longer horizons. Interestingly, we find that temporary benefit increases (which mainly took the form of one-time retroactive payments in the period we consider) have a much smaller impact on consumption. Neither permanent nor temporary increases in benefits appear to affect broader measure

12、s of economic activity, such as industrial production or employment.In some models of macroeconomic behavior, taxes and transfers have equal and opposite effects on household consumption and overall economic activity. To com-pare the effects of taxes and transfers, we expand our analysis to also inc

13、lude the relatively exogenous federal tax changes identified in Romer and Romer (2010). Like the permanent Social Security benefit increases, these tax changes were almost all legislated to be very long-lasting. We find large differences in the response of consumption to a permanent benefit increase

14、 and a tax cut. The effects of a benefit increase are faster, but much less persistent and substantially smaller overall. In both cases, the main component of consumption that responds is purchases of durable goods.One possible explanation for the seemingly short-lived response of consumption to a p

15、ermanent benefit increase, and the contrast with the impact of a tax cut, involves the response of monetary policy. We therefore examine both statistical and narrative evidence on the monetary policy reaction. We find that the federal funds rate rises in response to a benefit increase, and the effec

16、t is very fast, economically large, and highly statistically significant. Following an exogenous tax cut, in con-trast, the federal funds rate falls slightly over the first year. The records of Federal Reserve policy discussions reveal that policymakers were very aware of the benefit increases and o

17、ften viewed them as a reason to tighten monetary policy. In contrast, monetary policymakers were much less consistent in advocating for counteracting the likely impacts of tax changes on aggregate demand.The most important limitation of our study is simply that the amount of identifying variation th

18、at we are able to exploit is only moderate. Increases in Social Security benefits are small relative to the large changes in government purchases associated with major wars, and they are noticeably smaller than the tax changes that are the focus of Romer and Romer (2010). Our detailed information ab

19、out the monthly timing of benefit increases allows us to pin down their effects in the very near term relatively precisely. But once we consider horizons beyond a few months, the limited amount of variation often yields confidence intervals that are wide enough to encompass a range of economically i

20、nteresting hypotheses. Thus, this paper is only a first step in trying to understand the macroeconomic effects of government transfer payments.Our paper builds on and speaks to a range of literatures. Many papers examine the response of individuals to particular changes in income. Most find that as

21、long as the changes are not large, individuals respond to them when they occur, even if they could have known about them in advance or their impact on lifetime resources is small. Importantly, although this individual-level evidence is suggestive of a macroeconomic impact of changes in transfers, th

22、ere could be offsetting forces at the aggregate level. For example, there could be Ricardian-equivalence effects: the adverse implications for lifetime wealth of the higher future taxes needed to finance an increase in transfers could exert a downward influence on all individuals consumption. Likewi

23、se, there could be offsetting effects on aggregate consumption through higher interest rates, reduced confidence about government policy, or increased uncertainty about policy. Thus, a finding that individuals who receive a payment raise their consumption relative to individuals who do not is insuff

24、icient to establish that changes in transfers have important macroeconomic effects. It is therefore important to look directly at aggregate evidence.Like us, Wilcox (1989) looks at the response of aggregate consumption to Social Security benefit increases. Like much of the individual-level literatur

25、e, however, his focus is on the permanent income hypothesis: since the benefit increases are announced in advance, the hypothesis implies that consumption should not respond to their implementation. He shows that over the period 19651985, the immediate impact of permanent benefit increases on real r

26、etail sales and personal consumption expenditures is positive and statistically significant. Because our interest is in the macroeconomic effects of changes in transfers more broadly, we use narrative sources to construct a longer sample of benefit increases, and to identify and omit the few that we

27、re made in response to short-run macroeconomic developments. In our empirical analysis, we focus on the magnitude of the effects of benefit increases rather than just whether they are nonzero, examine whether the impact persists and whether it spreads to broader indicators of economic activity, and

28、compare the effects of permanent and temporary benefit changes. We go on to compare the effects of transfers and tax changes, and to investigate the response of monetary policy. While we replicate Wilcoxs finding of a strong immediate impact of permanent benefit increases on consumption, we find tha

29、t the effects disappear relatively quickly and do not spread, and we provide evidence that counteracting monetary developments likely explain much of this behavior.Our paper is clearly related to recent work on the macroeconomic effects of changes in fiscal policy. These papers use both time-series

30、evidence and cross-state variation. While this literature has generally found a significant positive impact of fiscal expansion, the implied fiscal multipliers differ substantially in both size and timing. Our paper provides another estimate of the effect of fiscal policy, using a type of fiscal cha

31、nge whose timing is relatively exogenous and can be identified quite accurately.Finally, much recent research has focused on the importance of monetary pol-icy for the effects of fiscal policy (for example, Leigh et al. 2010; Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Rebelo 2011; Woodford 2011; and Nakamura and S

32、teinsson 2014). Our study provides both statistical and narrative evidence of a link between Social Security benefit increases and contractionary monetary policy, and of different monetary policy responses to changes in transfers and taxes.Identifying Social Security Benefit IncreasesA central goal

33、of the paper is to use Social Security benefit increases to examine how consumption and other macroeconomic variables respond to changes in trans-fer payments. Thus, a critical step is to identify a set of benefit increases that are useful for this purpose.A. General ConsiderationsThere exist monthly data on aggregate Social Security payments in the Nat