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Laurence J. Kotlikoff

Laurence J. Kotlikoff, one of the nation's leading experts on fiscal policy, national saving, and personal finance and a columnist for Bloomberg, is Professor of Economics at Boston University.

Titles by This Author

The Clash of Generations

Saving Ourselves, Our Kids, and Our Economy
By Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns

The United States is bankrupt, flat broke. Thanks to accounting that would make Enron blush, America’s insolvency goes far beyond what our leaders are disclosing. The United States is a fiscal basket case, in worse shape than the notoriously bailed-out countries of Greece, Ireland, and others. How did this happen? In The Clash of Generations, experts Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns document our six-decade, off-balance-sheet, unsustainable financing scheme. They explain how we have balanced our longer lives on the backs of our (relatively few) children.

The Healthcare Fix

Universal Insurance for All Americans
By Laurence J. Kotlikoff

The shocking statistic is that forty-seven million Americans have no health insurance. When uninsured Americans go to the emergency room for treatment, however, they do receive care—and a bill. Many hospitals now require uninsured patients to put their treatment on a credit card—which can saddle a low-income household with unpayably high balances that can lead to personal bankruptcy. Why don't these people just buy health insurance? Because the cost of coverage that doesn't come through an employer is more than many low- and middle-income households make in a year.

The Coming Generational Storm

What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future
By Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns

This paperback edition of The Coming Generational Storm has been revised and updated and includes a new foreword by the authors.

Generational Policy

By Laurence J. Kotlikoff

In these eight 2002 Cairoli Lectures, presented at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Laurence Kotlikoff shows how generational policy works, how it is measured, and how much it matters. Kotlikoff discusses the incidence and measurement of generational policy, the relationship of generational policy to monetary policy, and the vacuity of deficits, taxes, and transfer payments as economic measures of fiscal policy.

What Determines Savings?

By Laurence J. Kotlikoff

Essays on Saving, Bequests, Altruism, and Life-cycle Planning

By Laurence J. Kotlikoff

This collection of essays, coauthored with other distinguished economists, offers new perspectives on saving, intergenerational economic ties, retirement planning, and the distribution of wealth. The book links life-cycle microeconomic behavior to important macroeconomic outcomes, including the roughly 50 percent postwar decline in America's rate of saving and its increasing wealth inequality. The book traces these outcomes to the government's five-decade-long policy of transferring, in the form of annuities, ever larger sums from young savers to old spenders.

Study Guide to Accompany Macroeconomics, Second Edition

An Integrated Approach
By Alan J. Auerbach and Laurence J. Kotlikoff

prepared by Debra Moore Patterson

Macroeconomics, Second Edition

An Integrated Approach
By Alan J. Auerbach and Laurence J. Kotlikoff

Many undergraduate texts treat macroeconomics as a set of distinct topics rather than as a unified body of theory and empirical findings. In contrast, this text by Alan Auerbach and Laurence Kotlikoff uses a single analytic framework—the two-period life-cycle model—to explore and connect each of the major issues in contemporary macroeconomics. The model describes the evolution of the economy over time in terms of the behavior of overlapping generations of individuals, each of whom lives for two periods: youth and old age.