Labor market frictions are not the only possible factor responsible for high unemployment. Credit market imperfections, driven by microeconomic frictions and impacted upon by macroeconomic factors such as monetary policy, could also be to blame. This paper shows that labor and credit market...

In a dynamically efficienct economy, can a government roll its debt forever and avoid the need to raise taxes? In a series of examples of production economies with zero growth, this paper shows that such Ponzi games may be infeasible even when the average rate of return on bonds is negative, and...

This paper examines how aversion to risk and aversion to intertemporal substitution determine the strength of the precautionary saving motive in a two-period model with Selden/Kreps-Porteus preferences. For small risks, we derive a measure of the strength of the precautionary saving motive which...

In a two-period Lucas tree economy in which ex ante identical, but ex post dissimilar, agents face undiversifiable labor income risk, calibrating a (wrong) representative agent model results in overstating the equilibrium riskfree rate and in understanding the equilibrium equity premium if the...

In monetary economies, international differences in rates of time preference do not in general lead to long run trade imbalances -- in sharp contrast with Butter's 119811 results on non-monetary overlapping generation economies. This claim is documented within the context of a simple two country...

Relative to traditional piecewise linear income taxation schemes, it is possible to increase government revenues by offering to consumers a menu of linear income tax schedules. In the resulting Pareto-superior equilibrium, consumers sort themselves out according to their (unobservable)...

Time-diary data from 27 countries show a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and female-male differences in total work time-work for pay and work at home. In rich non-Catholic countries on four continents men and women do about the same average amount of total work. Survey results...

Using two time-diary data sets each for Germany, Italy the Netherlands and the U.S. from 1985-2003, we demonstrate that Americans work more than Europeans: 1) in the market; 2) in total (market and home production)-- there is no one-for-one tradeoff across countries in total work; 3) at unusual...