Both empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that preference heterogeneity is a necessary feature of any model that is able to account for observed heterogeneity in wealth and lifetime income and consumption profiles. Why do tastes differ across people? We propose a framework in which people...

This paper focuses on the effects of a recent episode of trade liberalization in India. India underwent a massive reform in 1991 which involved slashing tariffs and opening up different industrial sectors to foreign direct investment. This episode, which is described in detail in a section of...

We present a model in which the gender gap in wages displays non-monotonic dynamics of the type observed in the US during the twentieth century. We show that the dynamics of the gender gap depend on the number of women that work at home in the early stage of their life and join the labor force...

In most democracies, the majority of education expenditures is financed by the government. In non-democracies, we observe a wide variation in the mix of public and private funding of education. In addition, countries with high inequality tend to rely more heavily on private schooling. We develop...

How does the size of the transfer system evolve in the short and in the long run? We construct a model where taxation is distortionary because it discourages capital accumulation. We compare the Ramsey allocation with the time-consistent allocation. The latter can be interpreted as the outcome...