This paper examines how policies affect people's welfare during business cycles when markets are incomplete. In particular, we analyze cyclical policies such as cyclical taxation and cyclical unemployment insurance. Those policies play two roles: smoothing the income (and consumption) process...

This paper examines the causes of observed increase in the duration of unemployment relative to the unemployment rate in the Post-War United States. First we analyze if changes in the demographic composition of U.S. labor force can explain the change in the structure of unemployment duration. In...

Men are generally observed to experience steeper wage increases during their work lives than women. Furthermore, men generally supply more hours to the labor market than women. While these observations are no longer as pronounced as they were 50 years ago, they still remain broadly true. This...

We study dynamic optimal taxation in a class of economies with private information over idiosyncratic skill shocks. We consider economies in which the skill distribution is first order Markov. We show that there exists a tax system that implements the constrained optimal allocation as...