Crowding Out in Ricardian Economies

The crowding-out coefficient is the ratio of the reduction in privately-issued bonds to the increase in government bonds that are issued to finance a tax cut. If (1) Ricardian Equivalence holds, and (2) households do not borrow risklessly while holding positive gross positions in other riskless assets, the crowding-out coefficient equals the fraction of the aggregate tax cut that accrues to households that borrow. In the conventional case in which all households receive equal tax cuts, the crowding-out coefficient equals the fraction of households that borrow; in the United States, about 75% of households borrow, so the crowding-out coefficient is predicted to be 0.75. Allowing for cross-sectional variation in tax changes increases the crowding-out coefficient to about 0.85.