The coexistence of barriers to labor mobility with large output-per-worker disparities driven by Total Factor Productivity (TFP) differences suggests that the world's labor force is misallocated across countries. We investigate the extent and consequences of this potential misallocation in the...

The coexistence of barriers to labor mobility with large output-per-worker disparities driven by Total Factor Productivity (TFP) differences suggests that the world's labor force is misallocated across countries. We investigate the extent and consequences of this potential misallocation in the...

In an economy with distortionary taxes on labor, can subsidies on day care, financed by an increase in taxes, raise welfare by encouraging women with small children to work? We show, within a heterogeneous-agent life-cycle framework, that the Ramsey optimal policy consists in equalizing...

In this paper, we document some features of the distribution of income, consumption and wealth in Canada using survey data from many different sources. We find that wage and income inequality has increased substantially over the last 30 years, but that much of this rise was offset by the tax and...

even greater extent than what tax deductibility implies.

In this paper we quantitatively investigate the implications of a model of consumption risk sharing where infinitely-lived households are subject to exogenous idiosyncratic shocks to their earnings, and where the realization of these shocks are private information. Our theoretical contribution...

In this paper, we study consumption risk sharing when individual income shocks are persistent and not publicly observable, and individuals can default on contracts at the price of financial autarky. We find that, in contrast to a model where the only friction is limited enforcement, our model...

Several approaches to finding the second-order approximation to a dynamic model have been proposed recently. This paper differs from the existing literature in that it makes use of the Magnus and Neudecker (1999) definition of the Hessian matrix. The key result is a linear system of equations...

In an economy with distortionary taxes on labor, can subsidies on day care, financed by an increase in taxes, raise welfare by encouraging women with small children to work? We show, within a heterogeneous-agent life-cycle framework, that the Ramsey optimal policy consists in equalizing...

This paper proposes and implements a new method of measuring the degree of consumption smoothing using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. The structure of this Survey is such that estimators previously used in the literature are inconsistent, simply because income is measured annually...