Laurence J. Kotlikoff

About

Laurence J. Kotlikoff is the William Fairfield Warren Professor of Economics at Boston University. His work encompasses a wide range of global, national, and personal policy issues, including climate change and carbon taxation, the global macroeconomic transition and the future of economic power, inequality, fiscal progressivity, and the use of economics to guide personal financial behavior. He also focuses on banking reform, marginal taxation and labor supply, healthcare reform, and social security. Professor Kotlikoff is recognized for his contributions to the field of economics as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometrica Society, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His academic background includes a PhD from Harvard University. He is actively involved in teaching and research at Boston University, contributing to the advancement of economic policy analysis and education.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Natural resource economics
• Economics
• Market economy
• Microeconomics
• Ecology

Selected publications

• MAKING CARBON TAXATION A GENERATIONAL WIN WIN

  International Economic Review · 2020 · 83 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Carbon taxation is mostly studied in social planner or infinitely lived‐agent models, which obscure carbon taxation's potential to produce a generational win win. This article's large‐scale, dynamic 55‐period, overlapping generations model calculates the carbon tax policy delivering the highest uniform welfare gain to all current and future generations. Our model features coal, oil, and gas, increasing extraction costs, clean energy, technical and demographic change, and Nordhaus' carbo…

  DOI

• How Much Lifetime Social Security Benefits Are Americans Leaving On the Table?

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-11-01 · 9 citations

  report

  Americans are notoriously bad savers. Large numbers are reaching old age too poor to finance retirements that could last longer than they worked. This study uses the 2018 American Community Survey to impute retirement ages for 2019 Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF) respondents. Next, we run the SCF respondents through the Fiscal Analyzer (TFA) to measure the size and distribution of forgone lifetime Social Security benefits. TFA is a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing research tool that incorporat…

  PublisherDOI

• Public economic gains from tax-financed investments in childhood immunization in the United States

  PLOS Global Public Health · 2023-10-18 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  The emergence of COVID-19 has displayed the importance of immunization and the need for continued public investment in vaccination programs. Globally, national vaccination programs rely heavily on tax-financed expenditure, requiring upfront investments and ongoing financial commitments. To evaluate annual public investments, we conducted a fiscal analysis that quantifies the public economic consequences to government in the United States attributable to childhood vaccination. To estimate the cha…

  PublisherDOI

• When Interest Rates Go Low, Should Public Debt Go High?

  American Economic Journal Macroeconomics · 2024-09-30 · 4 citations

  article

  Is deficit finance free when real borrowing rates are routinely lower than growth rates? Specifically, can the government make all generations better off by perpetually taking from the young and giving to the old? We study this in stochastic closed- and open-economy OLG models. Unfortunately, Pareto gains are predicted only for implausible calibrations. Even then, the gains reflect improved inter-generational risk sharing, improved international risk sharing, and beggaring thy neighbor—not inter…

  PublisherDOI

• Inflation's Impact on American Households

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-05-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access

  The post-COVID price surge has reignited interest in inflation’s impact on American households. Even if anticipated and with full market adjustments, inflation affects households through its interaction with the fiscal system, which is the focus of this paper. Inflation affects households through its interaction with the fiscal. We run the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), assuming different inflation rates, through the Fiscal Analyzer (TFA) – a life cycle, consumption-smoothing tool incor…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alan J. Auerbach

  University of California, Berkeley

  278 shared

• Jagadeesh Gokhale

  University of Pennsylvania

  139 shared

• Felix Kübler

  133 shared

• Johannes Brumm

  112 shared

• Xiangyu Feng

  Xiamen University

  110 shared

• Andrey Polbin

  Financial University

  88 shared

• Sabine Jokisch

  86 shared

• Hans Fehr

  University of Würzburg

  80 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Harvard University

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fellow of the Econometrica Society
• Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Resear…

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Benjamin Marxh-90
• Robert G. Kingh-77
• Pierre Perronh-72