Laurence Jacob Kotlikoff (born January 30, 1951) is a Professor of Economics at Boston University, a William Warren Fairfield Professor at
Boston University
Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...
, a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
, a Research Associate of the
National Bureau of Economic Research
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic c ...
, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and a former Senior Economist on the President's
Council of Economic Advisers
The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the President of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical resea ...
.
Kotlikoff has made contributions in the fields and subfields of
generational economics,
fiscal policy
In economics and political science, fiscal policy is the use of government revenue collection (taxes or tax cuts) and expenditure to influence a country's economy. The use of government revenue expenditures to influence macroeconomic variables ...
,
computational economics
Computational Economics is an interdisciplinary research discipline that involves computer science, economics, and management science.''Computational Economics''."About This Journal"an"Aims and Scope" This subject encompasses computational modeli ...
,
economic growth
Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of ...
, national saving, intra- and intergenerational
inequality
Inequality may refer to:
Economics
* Attention inequality, unequal distribution of attention across users, groups of people, issues in etc. in attention economy
* Economic inequality, difference in economic well-being between population groups
* ...
, sources of wealth accumulation, intergenerational
altruism
Altruism is the principle and moral practice of concern for the welfare and/or happiness of other human beings or animals, resulting in a quality of life both material and spiritual. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures and a core as ...
and intra-family risk sharing, banking reform,
carbon taxation, and
personal finance
Personal finance is the financial management which an individual or a family unit performs to budget, save, and spend monetary resources over time, taking into account various financial risks and future life events.
When planning personal fi ...
. He has also done work on Social Security, healthcare, tax, banking reform, inequality within and across generations, fiscal progressivity, carbon policy, and the potential risks of government Ponzi schemes even when a government safe interest rate is routinely lower than its growth rate.
Kotlikoff is a public intellectual. His columns have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, the PBS NewsHour, the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, Yahoo, CNBC, and other major outlets. Kotlikoff is a frequent guest on numerous podcasts and radio shows. He is routinely quoted by the media on a wide range of economic issues. Over the years, Kotlikoff has testified to Congress on tax reform, generational policy, and other economic issues on 19 occasions.
Kotlikoff attempted to run for
President of the United States
The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United Stat ...
in the
2012 election, and sought the nominations of the advocacy group
Americans Elect
Americans Elect was a political organization in the United States known primarily for its efforts to stage a national online primary for the 2012 US Presidential Election. Although it was successful in obtaining signatures to get on the ballot i ...
and the
Reform Party of the United States
The Reform Party of the United States of America (RPUSA), generally known as the Reform Party USA or the Reform Party, is a centrist political party in the United States, founded in 1995 by Ross Perot.
Perot believed Americans were disillusione ...
before ending his campaign in May 2012 when
Americans Elect
Americans Elect was a political organization in the United States known primarily for its efforts to stage a national online primary for the 2012 US Presidential Election. Although it was successful in obtaining signatures to get on the ballot i ...
ceased operations. Kotlikoff ran for president in 2016 as an independent alongside his Vice President, Dr. Edward Leamer, a renowned economist at UCLA. He achieved ballot-access in 38 states, making him one of only six people in the country that could be legally elected president. His campaign garnered major press from Bloomberg, ''The Wall Street Journal'', ''The Boston Globe'', and other major outlets. Kotlikoff's stated goal in running for President was to provide an economics-based policy-reform platform. After the 2016 election, Kotlikoff released his platform on his kotlikoff.net website in the form of a monograph entitled, You're Hired!
Research
Early research
Kotlikoff's thesis examined, in a life-cycle simulation model, the impact of intergenerational redistribution on the long-run position of the economy. He also studied whether the rich spend a larger or smaller share of their lifetime resources than do the poor. And he provided a new empirical approach to understanding the impact of Social Security on saving. At UCLA, Kotlikoff wrote a paper with Avia Spivak on intra-family risk-sharing entitled "The Family as an Incomplete Annuities Market."
He also wrote a widely cited paper with
Lawrence Summers
Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist who served as the 71st United States secretary of the treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as pre ...
questioning the importance of saving for
retirement
Retirement is the withdrawal from one's position or occupation or from one's active working life. A person may also semi-retire by reducing work hours or workload.
Many people choose to retire when they are elderly or incapable of doing their j ...
in determining total
U.S. wealth accumulation.
The publication suggested that most of U.S. wealth accumulation was not attributed to life-cycle
saving
Saving is income not spent, or deferred consumption. Methods of saving include putting money aside in, for example, a deposit account, a pension account, an investment fund, or as cash. Saving also involves reducing expenditures, such as recur ...
, but rather to private intergenerational transfers (whether intended or unintended).
The article was the subject of a lively debate between Kotlikoff and
Franco Modigliani
Franco Modigliani (18 June 1918 – 25 September 2003) was an Italian-American economist and the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He was a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Carnegie Mellon Uni ...
, who won the Nobel Prize in part for his work on the life-cycle model.
Generational accounting
Kotlikoff, together with Alan Auerbach and Jagadeesh Gokhale, pioneered Generational Accounting, which measures the fiscal burdens facing today's and tomorrow's children. Kotlikoff's work on the relativity of fiscal language claims to show that conventional fiscal measures, including the government's deficit, are not well defined from the perspective of economic theory.
According to Kotlikoff, their measurement reflects economically arbitrary fiscal labeling conventions. He argues that an "Economics labeling problem," as he calls it, has led to gross misreadings of the fiscal positions of different countries, starting with the United States, which has a relatively small
debt-to-GDP ratio
In economics, the debt-to-GDP ratio is the ratio between a country's government debt (measured in units of currency) and its gross domestic product (GDP) (measured in units of currency per year). While it is a "ratio", it is technically measured i ...
, but, he argues, is in worse fiscal shape than any other developed country due to its unofficial, i.e., off-the-books, obligations. In 1991, Kotlikoff, together with Alan Auerbach and Jagadeesh Gokhale, produced th
first set of generational accounts] for the United States.
Their study claimed to find a major
fiscal gap
The fiscal gap is a measure of a government's total indebtedness proposed by economists Laurence Kotlikoff and Alan Auerbach, who define it as the difference between the present value of all of government's projected financial obligations, includin ...
separating future government spending commitments and its means of paying for those commitments, portending dramatic increases in the lifetime net tax burdens facing young and future generations. The generational accounting and fiscal gap accounting developed by Auerbach, Gokhale, and Kotlikoff is a means of assessing the sustainability of fiscal policy and how different countries intend to treat their progeny. Recen
generational accountingby the IMF an
fiscal gap accountingby Kotlikoff claim to confirm the truly severe long-run fiscal problems facing the U.S.
The Auerbach-Kotlikoff Model
In the late 1970s, Kotlikoff, together with Berkeley
economist
An economist is a professional and practitioner in the social sciences, social science discipline of economics.
The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this ...
,
Alan J. Auerbach, developed the first large-scale computable general equilibrium life-cycle model that can track the behavior, over time, of economies comprising large numbers of overlapping generations.
[Dynamic Fiscal Policy](_blank)
(with Alan Auerbach), Cambridge University Press, 1987. The Auerbach-Kotlikoff model is widely used by economists to study the transition paths of closed as well as open economies as well as the dynamic impact of fiscal and other policies.
A relatively recent incarnation of the Auerbach-Kotlikoff model is a paper by Hans Fehr, Sabine Jokisch, and Laurence Kotlikoff entitled
Dynamic Globalization and Its Potentially Alarming Prospects for Low-Wage Workers" includes five regions (the U.S., Europe, Japan, China, and India), six goods, region-specific fiscal policy and demographics, and the endogenous determination of the pattern of specialization.. The most recent use of the Auerbach-Kotlikoff model has been to study, together with economists Felix Kubler, Andrey Polbin, and Simon Scheidegger, the economics of carbon change, particularly the optimal uniformly welfare-improving carbon-tax policy. This is the carbon tax cum side payments that produces the highest uniform welfare gain for all current and future generations in all regions of the world.
The general relativity of fiscal language
In 1984, Kotlikoff wrote a fundamental paper entitled "Deficit Delusion", which appeared in The Public Interest. This was the first of a series of papers and books (see, e.g.
Generational Accountingan
Generational Policy by Kotlikoff, including work with co-authors, showing, via examples, that in economic models featuring rational agents, "the" deficit is a figment of language, not economics. I.e., the deficit is not economically well defined. Instead, what governments measure as "the" deficit is entirely a result of the language they use to label government receipts and payments.
If the government calls a receipt a "tax," this lowers the reported deficit. If, instead, it calls the receipt "borrowing," it raises the reported deficit. Thus, if you give the government, say, $1,000 this year, it can say it is taxing you $1,000 this year. Alternatively, it can say it is borrowing $1,000 from you this year and will be taxing you in, say, five years the $1,000 plus accrued interest and using this future tax to pay you the principal plus interest due in the future on the current borrowing. With one set of words the deficit is $1,000 larger this year than with the other set of words.
If it so chose, the government could say it was taxing you $1,000 this year and also, this year, borrowing $1 trillion from you for, say, five years, making a transfer payment to you this year of $1 trillion, and taxing you in five years an amount equal to principal plus interest on the $1 trillion and using it to pay principal plus interest on the $1 trillion it is now borrowing. With this alternative choice of words, the reported deficit is $1 trillion larger than with the first set of words. But in all three examples, you hand over $1,000 this year and receive and pay zero on net in the future.
Einstein taught us that neither time, nor distance are well-defined physical concepts. Instead, their measurement is relative to our frame of reference – how fast we were traveling in the universe and in what direction. Our physical frame of reference can be viewed as our language or labeling convention. Einstein showed that neither time nor distance were well-defined concepts, but could be measured in an infinite number of ways. The same is true of the deficit. Just like absolute time and distance are not well defined, the deficit and related conventional fiscal measures has no economic meaning.
Kotlikoff, along with Harvard's Jerry Green, offered a general proof of the proposition that deficits and a number of other conventional fiscal measures are, economically speaking, content-free, concluding that the deficit is simply an arbitrary figment of language in all economic models involving rational agents.
Such models can feature all manner of individual and aggregate uncertainty, incomplete markets, distortionary fiscal policy, asymmetric information, borrowing constraints, time-inconsistent government policy, and a host of other problems, yet "the" deficit will still bear no theoretical connection to real policy-induced economic outcomes. The reason, again, is that there is no single deficit, but rather an infinity of deficit or surplus policy paths that can be announced (by the government or any private agent) simply by choosing the "right" fiscal labels.
Frames of reference
According to Kotlikoff, using the deficit as a guide to fiscal policy is like driving in Los Angeles with a map of New York City. For unlike in our physical world in which we are all using the same language (have the same frame of reference), in the world of economics, we are each free to adopt our own frame of reference – our own labeling convention. Thus, if Joe wants to claim that the U.S. federal government ran enormous surpluses for the last 50 years, he can simply choose appropriate words to label historic receipts and payments to produce that time series.
If Sally wishes to claim the opposite, there are words she can find to justify her view of the past stance of fiscal policy. And if Sam wishes to claim that that economy has experienced fluctuations from deficits to surpluses of arbitrary magnitude from year to year, he can do so. Language is extremely flexible. And there is nothing in economic theory that pins down how we discuss economic theory.
Kotlikoff and Green claim that fiscal variables in all mathematical economic models involving rational agents can be labeled freely and tell us nothing about the models themselves (no more than does choosing to discuss the models in French or English), and this means that the multitudinous econometric studies relating well-defined economic variables, such as interest rates or aggregate personal consumption, to "the" deficit are, economically speaking, content free.
According to Kotlikoff, the deficit is not the only variable that is not well defined. An economy's aggregate tax revenue, its aggregate transfer payments, its disposable income, its personal and private saving rates, and its level of private wealth – all are non-economic concepts that have, from the perspective of economic theories with rational agents, no more purchase on economic reality than does the emperor's clothes in Hans Christian Andersen's famous children's story.
Kotlikoff chose the title of his paper with Green not to suggest in the slightest any comparison of intellect with Einstein, but rather because of what seemed to him to be a strikingly similar message about confusing linguistics for substance. An example here is the definition of a capitalistic economy as one in which capital is primarily owed by the private sector. Kotlikoff claims that an economy that is described as having predominately privately owned wealth can just as well be described as one in which wealth is predominantly or, for that matter, entirely state-owned. Hence, "deficit delusion" implies that economic theory offers no precise measure/definition of capitalism, socialism, or communism.
Intergenerational altruism
Kotlikoff has done pioneering work testing intergenerational altruism – the proposition that current generations care about their descendants enough to ensure that government redistribution from their descendants to themselves will be offset by private redistribution back to the descendants either in the form of bequests or gifts. This proposition dates to
David Ricardo
David Ricardo (18 April 1772 – 11 September 1823) was a British Political economy, political economist. He was one of the most influential of the Classical economics, classical economists along with Thomas Robert Malthus, Thomas Malthus, Ad ...
, who raised it as a theoretical, but empirically irrelevant proposition.
In 1974, Robert Barro revived "Ricardian Equivalence" by showing in a simple, elegant framework that each generation's caring about its children leads current generations to be altruistically linked to all their descendants. Hence, a government policy of transferring resources to current older generations at a cost to generations born, say, in 100 years would induce the current elderly to simply increase their gifts and bequests to their children who would pass the resources onward until it reached those born in 100 years.
This inter-linkage of current and future generations devolves into a mathematical model which is isomorphic to one in which all agents are infinitely lived (i.e., they act as if they live for ever in so far as their progeny are front and center in their preferences). The infinitely-lived model was originally posited by Frank Ramsey in the 1920s. Its aggregation properties make it very convenient for teaching macro economics because one does not have to deal with the messiness of upwards of 100 overlapping generations acting independently, but also interdependently. Consequently, it has become a mainstay in graduate macroeconomics training and underlies the work by Economics Nobel Laureate
Ed Prescott
Edward Christian Prescott (December 26, 1940 – November 6, 2022) was an American economist. He received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with ...
and other economists on
Real Business Cycle
Real business-cycle theory (RBC theory) is a class of new classical macroeconomics models in which business-cycle fluctuations are accounted for by real (in contrast to nominal) shocks. Unlike other leading theories of the business cycle, RBC t ...
models.
Kotlikoff's singly and jointly authored work in the 1980s and 1990 called this model into question on both theoretical and empirical grounds. In a paper entitled "Altruistic Linkages within the Extended Family: A Note (1983)," which appears in Kotlikoff's 1989 MIT Press book What Determines Savings? Kotlikoff showed that when agents take each other's transfers as given, marriage generates intergenerational linkages between unrelated individuals.
I.e., if you, Steve, are altruistic toward your daughter, Sue, and your daughter marries John, who is altruistically linked to his father Ed, who has a daughter Sara who is altruistic toward her husband David, who cares about his sister Ida, who cares about her father-in-law Frank, you Steve are altruistically linked to Frank. Furthermore, if Frank loses a dollar and you gain a dollar, Barro's model implies that you Steve will take your newfound dollar and hand it to Frank. Kyle Bagwell and Douglas Bernheim independently reached Kotlikoff's conclusion, namely that the Barro model had patently absurd implications.
Together with Assaf Razin and Robert Rosenthal, Kotlikoff showed in
that dropping the unrealistic assumption that transfers are taken as given and permitting individuals to refuse transfers (e.g., refusing your mother's offer of an extra helping of cabbage) invalidates Barro's proposition of Ricardian Equivalence. I.e., they showed that Barro's model was a combination of a plausible set of preferences (altruism toward one's children) and an implausible assumption about the game being played by donors and donees.
In a series of empirical papers with Stanford economist Michael Boskin, University of Pennsylvania economist Andrew Abel, Yale economist
Joseph Altonji
Joseph Gerard Altonji (born 1953) is an American labour economist and the Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics at Yale University. His fields of interest include macroeconomics and applied econometrics and in particular labour economics, ...
, and Tokyo University economist Fumio Hayashi, Kotlikoff and his co-authors showed that there was little, if any, empirical support for Barro's very special model of intergenerational altruism.
Generational redistribution
In life-cycle models without operative intergenerational altruism, the young are the big savers because of every dollar they receive, they save a larger percentage than do the elderly for the simple reason that the elderly are closer to the ends of their lives and want to use it before they lose it. The unborn are, of course, the biggest savers because giving them an extra dollar (that they will be able to collect with interest when they arrive) leads them to consume nothing more in the present because they aren't yet alive.
So taking from the young and unborn and giving to the elderly should lead to a decline in national saving. In a 1996 paper with Jagadeesh Gokhale and John Sablehaus, Kotlikoff showed that the ongoing massive redistribution from young and future savers to old savers was responsible for the postwar decline in U.S. saving.
Notwithstanding his many studies overturning Ricardian Equivalence, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, Kotlikoff has a paper showing why intergenerational transfers may have no impact on the economy in a world of purely selfish life-cycle agents. The argument presented is simple. Once younger generations have been maximally exploited by older generations (who are assumed to have the ability to redistribute from the young to themselves), older generations can no longer extract resources for free, meaning they can no longer leave higher fiscal burdens for future generations without handing over a quid pro quo. At such an extreme, intergenerational transfers, per se, are no longer feasible because the young will refuse to accept them.
Policy reform proposals
Kotlikoff has written that the economic future is bleak for the United States without tax reform,
health care reform
Health care reform is for the most part governmental policy that affects health care delivery in a given place. Health care reform typically attempts to:
* Broaden the population that receives health care coverage through either public sector insur ...
, and
Social Security reform
This article concerns proposals to change the Social Security system in the United States. Social Security is a social insurance program officially called "Old-age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance" (OASDI), in reference to its three components ...
in his book ''
The Coming Generational Storm'' and other publications.
Taxes
Kotlikoff has been a supporter of the
FairTax proposal as a replacement for the federal tax code, contributing to research of plan's effects and the required rate for revenue neutrality.
In 2010, Kotlikoff offered his own tax proposal, titled the ''Purple Tax'' (a blend of red and blue), a consumption levy that he says cleans up some problems with the FairTax.
His plan calls for a 15% final (17.5% nominal) sales tax. The FICA tax ceiling is gone and the 7.65% of the employees contribution is applied on everything after $40,000 but the employer pays 7.65% on the employees entire salary.
Finance
Kotlikoff's proposed reform of the financial system, discussed in ''Jimmy Stewart Is Dead'', called Limited Purpose Banking, transforms all financial companies with limited liability, including incorporated banks, insurance companies, financial exchanges, and hedge funds, into pass-through mutual funds, which do not borrow to invest in risky assets, but, instead, allows the public to directly choose what risks it wishes to bear by purchasing more or less risky mutual funds.
According to Kotlikoff, Limited Purpose Banking keeps banks, insurance companies, hedge funds and other financial corporations from borrowing short and lending long, which leaves the public to pick up the pieces when things go south.
Instead, Kotlikoff argues Limited Purpose Banking forces financial intermediaries to limit their activities to their sole legitimate purpose—financial inter-mediation.
It would substitute the vast array of extant federal and state financial regulatory bodies with a single financial regulator called the Federal Financial Authority (FFA), which would have a narrow purpose namely to verify, disclose, and oversee the independent rating and custody off all securities purchased and sold by mutual funds.
Healthcare
In his 2007 book, ''The Healthcare Fix'', Kotlikoff proposed a major reform of the U.S. healthcare system, subsequently dubbed "The Purple Health Plan",
[The Purple Health Plan](_blank)
/ref> that would do away with Medicare, Medicaid
Medicaid in the United States is a federal and state program that helps with healthcare costs for some people with limited income and resources. Medicaid also offers benefits not normally covered by Medicare, including nursing home care and pers ...
, employer-based healthcare, and health exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and colloquially known as Obamacare, is a landmark U.S. federal statute enacted by the 111th United States Congress and signed into law by Presid ...
. In their place, every American would receive a voucher for a basic health insurance policy, whose coverages would be established by a panel of doctors such that the total cost of all vouchers remained within a fixed share, e.g., 10 percent, of GDP. The voucher would be provided by the government at no cost and its amount would be individually risk-adjusted, i.e., sicker people would receive larger vouchers. No health insurance company providing the basic insurance plan could turn anyone away and those who could afford supplemental health insurance plans would be free to purchase them.
According to Kotlikoff, the plan provides universal basic health insurance, retains private provision of healthcare, limits government healthcare spending to a fixed share of GDP, and avoids adverse selection. Kotlikoff has denounced critics of the plan such as economist Paul Krugman and President Obama for demagoguery over word voucher—arguing that the current health care law relies on vouchers. He argues that the current Medicare program is unsustainable and that we have no choice but to embrace a plan with vouchers. In order to highlight his Purple Plans, Kotlikoff ran for the nomination of the Americans Elect platform in its short-lived effort to field a third party candidate in the 2012 Presidential election.
Political parties
Kotlikoff fervently dislikes both major political parties and has called for a third party. In January 2012, Kotlikoff announced his plans to run as a third party
Third party may refer to:
Business
* Third-party source, a supplier company not owned by the buyer or seller
* Third-party beneficiary, a person who could sue on a contract, despite not being an active party
* Third-party insurance, such as a Veh ...
candidate for President of the United States in 2012. Kotlikoff said he would seek the presidential nomination of the non-partisan
Nonpartisanism is a lack of affiliation with, and a lack of bias towards, a political party.
While an Oxford English Dictionary definition of ''partisan'' includes adherents of a party, cause, person, etc., in most cases, nonpartisan refers sp ...
advocacy group Americans Elect
Americans Elect was a political organization in the United States known primarily for its efforts to stage a national online primary for the 2012 US Presidential Election. Although it was successful in obtaining signatures to get on the ballot i ...
.[ He announced in May that he would also seek the nomination of the ]Reform Party of the United States
The Reform Party of the United States of America (RPUSA), generally known as the Reform Party USA or the Reform Party, is a centrist political party in the United States, founded in 1995 by Ross Perot.
Perot believed Americans were disillusione ...
, but ended the bid after the Americans Elect board decided to not field a 2012 presidential ticket.
In the 2016 Presidential Election, Kotlikoff ran as a registered, write-in candidate. He was defeated by Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Other ventures
Kotlikoff is the President of Economic Security Planning, Inc., a company that markets MaxiFi Planner, an economics-based personal financial planning software program, and "Maximize My Social Security", a software program that helps Americans decide which Social Security benefits to take and when, to get the highest lifetime benefits.
Books
* The Economic Consequences of the Vickers Commission, Civitas, 2012.
* The Clash of Generations, (with Scott Burns), MIT Press, 2012.
* Jimmy Stewart is Dead – Ending the World's Ongoing Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking. John Wiley and Sons, 2010.
* Spend 'Til the End – The Revolutionary Guide to Raising Your Living Standard, Today and When You Retire. Simon & Schuster, (with Scott Burns), 2008.
* The Healthcare Fix – Universal Insurance for All Americans, MIT Press, 2007.
* The Coming Generational Storm, (with Scott Burns), MIT Press, 2004.
* Generational Policy, The 2002 Caroli Lectures, MIT Press, 2003.
* Essays on Saving, Bequests, Altruism, and Life-Cycle Planning, MIT Press, 2001.
* Generational Accounting Around the World, co-edited with Alan Auerbach and Willi Leibfritz, NBER volume, University of Chicago Press, 1999.
* Macroeconomics: An Integrated Approach Second Edition, (with Alan Auerbach), MIT Press, 1998.
* Macroeconomics: An Integrated Approach (with Alan Auerbach), Southwestern Publishing Co., 1994.
* Generational Accounting, The Free Press, 1992.
* What Determines Savings, MIT Press, 1989.
* The Wage Carrot and the Pension Stick: Retirement Benefits and Labor Force Participation (with David Wise), The W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1989.
* Dynamic Fiscal Policy (with Alan Auerbach), Cambridge University Press, 1987.
* Pensions in the American Economy (with Daniel Smith), University of Chicago Press, 1983.
* Get What's Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security (with Philip Moeller and Paul Solman), Simon and Schuster, 2015.
References
* Laurence J. Kotlikoff, 1987, "social security," ''The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'', v. 4, pp. 413–18. Stockton Press
* Laurence J. Kotlikoff, 1992, ''Generational Accounting'', The Free Press
* Laurence J. Kotlikoff, 2006,
Is the United States Bankrupt?
" Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ''Review'', July/August, 88(4), pp. 235–49.
* Laurence J. Kotlikoff, October 22, 2006.
Drifting to Future Bankruptcy
" ''The Philadelphia Inquirer''
* Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns (2004). ''The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future. MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962.
History
The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...
.
Description
and chapter-preview links, p
vii.
* Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, 2008. ''Spend 'til the End: The Revolutionary Guide to Raising Your Living Standard – Today and When You Retire', Simon & Schuster
Description
and
Preview
link to chapter links, via right-arrow at top to pp. 11–12.
*
*
Notes
External links
Kotlikoff.net
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kotlikoff, Laurence
1951 births
Living people
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American economists
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Boston University faculty
Harvard University alumni
Public economists
United States Council of Economic Advisers
Candidates in the 2012 United States presidential election
Candidates in the 2016 United States presidential election
21st-century American politicians
University of Pennsylvania alumni
Fellows of the Econometric Society
21st-century American Jews