We study the optimal design of means-tested transfers and progressive income taxes. In a simple analytical model, we demonstrate an optimally negative relation between transfers and income-tax progressivity due to efficiency and redistribution concerns. In a rich dynamic model, we quantify the...

Empirical work suggests that while government spending induces an increase in output, it does not signi ficantly decrease private consumption. Contrary to these fi ndings, most representative-household models in macroeconomics predict a crowding-out of private consumption by government spending....

This paper investigates how government spending multipliers depend on the distribution of taxes across households. We exploit historical variations in the financing of spending in the U.S. since 1913 to show that multipliers are positive only when financed with more progressive taxes, and zero...

More than 40% of US college students drop out without gaining a degree. This paper investigates whether dropouts are largely due to academic ability or financial constraints. For that purpose, I build a quantitative general-equilibrium overlapping generations model, where individuals face...

We assess the quantitative relevance of expectations-driven sovereign debt crises, focusing on the Southern European crisis of the early 2010s and the Argentine default of 2001. The source of multiplicity is the one in Calvo (1988). Key for multiplicity is an output process featuring long...

This paper studies the unemployment accelerator, a mechanism where workers directly affect the firms’ financial conditions, and, in turn, firms’ financial conditions feedback again to the real economy. The unemployment accelerator builds on two key assumptions: search frictions in the labor...