Starting slowly with the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and culminating in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, means-tested public health insurance eligibility expanded to include adults in low-income families regardless of their asset holdings. This paper quantifies the effects of these eligibility...

The recent financial crisis has stimulated theoretical and empirical research on the propagation mechanisms underlying business cycles, in particular on the role of financial frictions. Many issues concerning the interactions between banking and monetary policy forced policy makers to redefine...

I study a vintage-human-capital model in which long-lived workers accumulate human capital following an exogenous learning curve. Different skill levels inside a vintage are complementary in production; this makes the ex ante homogeneous workers enter different vintages. The continuous-time...

Luxury bequests impart systematic effects of age to an investor's optimal allocation: the expected percentage allocation to equities rises throughout retirement. When bequests are luxuries the marginal utility of bequests declines more slowly than the marginal utility of consumption. This is...

We conducted asset market experiments where one experienced subject interacts with five inexperienced subjects to investigate how experienced subjects change their price forecasts and trading behavior when faced with strategic uncertainty caused by inflows of inexperienced subjects. Only half...

This paper presents a DSGE model in which long run inflation risk matters for social welfare. Optimal indexation of long-term government debt is studied under two monetary policy regimes: inflation targeting (IT) and price-level targeting (PT). Under IT, full indexation is optimal because long...

This paper addresses the positive implications of indexing risky debt to observable aggregate conditions. These issues are pursued within the context of the celebrated financial accelerator model of Bernanke et al. (1999). The principal conclusions include: (1) the estimated level of indexation...

I describe a tractable way to study macroeconomic quantities and asset prices in a large class of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The proposed approximate solution is analytical, log-linear, and adjusted for risk. Therefore, it is well suited to investigate economic mechanisms,...

Self-employment comprises an important share of employment in many countries, and tends to expand during downturns through higher inflows from unemployment. Furthermore, countries with higher self-employment shares exhibit lower cyclical output persistence. I build a business cycle model with...

This paper computes the welfare effect of the Great Moderation, using a representative-agent consumption-based asset pricing model. The Great Moderation is modeled according to the data properties of consumption and dividend growth rates, which display a reduction of their innovation-volatility...