We study the effects of public investment in a dynamic overlapping-generations model of a small open economy. Boosting public investment stimulates private capital formation, output, employment, and wages in the long run. The impact effects depend critically on whether public capital is modeled as a stock or as a flow. The welfare benefits are unevenly distributed across generations since capital ownership, and the capital gain induced by the policy shock, rises with age, and because wages rise only gradually under the stock interpretation of public capital. A suitable egalitarian bond policy can be employed to ensure that everybody gains to the same extent. With this additional instrument the intergenerational externality can be neutralized and the resulting efficiency gain coincides with the one obtained in the corresponding representative agent model. A simple modified golden rule for public investment is derived which takes into account the time that is needed to build the public capital stock.
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Paper provided by Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research in its series Discussion Paper with number
80.
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D62 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Externalities E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy F41 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - Open Economy Macroeconomics H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies H54 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Infrastructures
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