[1] A specialist in macroeconomics and public finance, he has contributed to a range of fields, including climate change and carbon taxation, the global macroeconomic transition and the future of economic power, inequality, fiscal progressivity, economic guides to personal financial behavior, banking reform, marginal taxation and labor supply, healthcare reform, and social security.

Kotlikoff is a frequent guest on numerous podcasts and radio shows, and is routinely quoted by the media on a wide range of economic issues.

"[9] He also wrote a widely cited paper with Lawrence Summers questioning the importance of saving for retirement in determining total U.S. wealth accumulation.

[10] The article was the subject of a lively debate between Kotlikoff and Franco Modigliani, who won the Nobel Prize in part for his work on the life-cycle model.

[11] Kotlikoff, together with Alan Auerbach and Jagadeesh Gokhale, pioneered Generational Accounting, which measures the fiscal burdens facing today's and tomorrow's children.

[citation needed] In 1991, Kotlikoff, together with Alan Auerbach and Jagadeesh Gokhale, produced the [1] first set of generational accounts] for the United States.

[citation needed] Recent generational accounting by the IMF and fiscal gap accounting by Kotlikoff claim to confirm the truly severe long-run fiscal problems facing the U.S.[citation needed] In the late 1970s, Kotlikoff, together with Berkeley economist, Alan J. Auerbach, developed the first large-scale computable general equilibrium life-cycle model that can track the behavior, over time, of economies comprising large numbers of overlapping generations.

[13] The Auerbach-Kotlikoff model is widely used by economists to study the transition paths of closed as well as open economies as well as the dynamic impact of fiscal and other policies.

A relatively recent incarnation of the Auerbach-Kotlikoff model is a paper by Hans Fehr, Sabine Jokisch, and Laurence Kotlikoff entitled "Dynamic Globalization and Its Potentially Alarming Prospects for Low-Wage Workers," includes five regions (the U.S., Europe, Japan, China, and India), six goods, region-specific fiscal policy and demographics, and the endogenous determination of the pattern of specialization.

The most recent use of the Auerbach-Kotlikoff model has been to study, together with economists Felix Kubler, Andrey Polbin, and Simon Scheidegger, the economics of carbon change, particularly the optimal uniformly welfare-improving carbon-tax policy.

This is the carbon tax cum side payments that produces the highest uniform welfare gain for all current and future generations in all regions of the world.

Thus, if Joe wants to claim that the U.S. federal government ran enormous surpluses for the last 50 years, he can simply choose appropriate words to label historic receipts and payments to produce that time series.

[citation needed] If Sally wishes to claim the opposite, there are words she can find to justify her view of the past stance of fiscal policy.

[citation needed] An economy's aggregate tax revenue, its aggregate transfer payments, its disposable income, its personal and private saving rates, and its level of private wealth – all are non-economic concepts that have, from the perspective of economic theories with rational agents, no more purchase on economic reality than does the emperor's clothes in Hans Christian Andersen's famous children's story.

[citation needed] Kotlikoff chose the title of his paper with Green not to suggest in the slightest any comparison of intellect with Einstein,[original research?]

Its aggregation properties make it very convenient for teaching macro economics because one does not have to deal with the messiness of upwards of 100 overlapping generations acting independently, but also interdependently.

Consequently, it has become a mainstay in graduate macroeconomics training and underlies the work by Economics Nobel Laureate Ed Prescott and other economists on Real Business Cycle models.

In a paper entitled "Altruistic Linkages within the Extended Family: A Note (1983)," which appears in Kotlikoff's 1989 MIT Press book What Determines Savings?

Kyle Bagwell and Douglas Bernheim independently reached Kotlikoff's conclusion, namely that the Barro model had patently absurd implications.

I.e., they showed that Barro's model was a combination of a plausible set of preferences (altruism toward one's children) and an implausible assumption about the game being played by donors and donees.

The unborn are, of course, the biggest savers because giving them an extra dollar (that they will be able to collect with interest when they arrive) leads them to consume nothing more in the present because they aren't yet alive.

[15] Notwithstanding his many studies overturning Ricardian Equivalence, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, Kotlikoff has a paper showing why intergenerational transfers may have no impact on the economy in a world of purely selfish life-cycle agents.

[16] Kotlikoff has been a supporter of the FairTax proposal as a replacement for the federal tax code, contributing to research of plan's effects and the required rate for revenue neutrality.

[25][26] Kotlikoff has denounced critics of the plan such as economist Paul Krugman and President Obama for demagoguery over word voucher—arguing that the current health care law relies on vouchers.

[7][30][31] He announced in May that he would also seek the nomination of the Reform Party of the United States,[32] but ended the bid after the Americans Elect board decided to not field a 2012 presidential ticket.