Glenn on Policies to Increase Economic Growth and Reduce the Federal Budget Deficit

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Glenn, along with co-authors Douglas Elmendorf of Harvard’s Kennedy School and Zachary Liscow of the Yale Law School, has written a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper: “Policies to Reduce Federal Budget Deficits by Increasing Economic Growth”

Here’s the abstract:

Could policy changes boost economic growth enough and at a low enough cost to meaningfully reduce federal budget deficits? We assess seven areas of economic policy: immigration of high-skilled workers, housing regulation, safety net programs, regulation of electricity transmission, government support for research and development, tax policy related to business investment, and permitting of infrastructure construction. We find that growth-enhancing policies almost certainly cannot stabilize federal debt on their own, but that such policies can reduce the explicit tax hikes, spending cuts, or both that are needed to stabilize debt. We also find a dearth of research on the likely impacts of potential growth-enhancing policies and on ways to design such policies to restrain federal debt, and we offer suggestions for ways to build a larger base of evidence.

The full working paper can be found at this link.