We study the costs and benefits of Medicaid in a model in which retired single people optimally choose consumption, medical spending and saving, while facing uncertainty about their health, lifespan and medical needs. We document Medicaid take-up rates by age, permanent income, and gender in the...

We study the effects of credit shocks in a model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financing constraints, and a realistic firm size distribution. As entrepreneurial firms can grow only slowly in this set-up, we show that, by reducing entrepreneurial firm size, negative shocks have a very...