Friday, August 27, 2010

Payments to Veterans and Survivors

Professor Ryan Edwards writes

"I recently put out an NBER wp that looks at historical war costs and reports that between a half and a third of the present value of costs are long-lived payments to veterans and survivors, and that the half lives of payments have averaged 30 years.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w16108

One of the big questions this raised in my mind was what the broader macro effects of war spending really was, since it's clearly not (or at least, no longer) a temporary shock as in the standard textbook model."

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