Why do so few retirees purchase private annuities? Recent research suggests that bequest motives, precautionary savings motives, and actuarially-unfair pricing can explain the lack of demand for annuities. The degree to which these forces can explain the annuity puzzle depends crucially on...

This paper quantifies the distributional costs of fiscal uncertainty in a neoclassical stochastic growth environment. We set up an incomplete-market model where heterogeneous households face uninsurable idiosyncratic risks in the processes of labor income and discount factor. Aggregate...

Perla and Tonetti (2014) and Lucas and Moll (2014) study technology diffusion in isolation, in environments without the generation of new ideas. Without new ideas, growth cannot continue forever if there is a finite technology frontier. This paper examines, in an economy in which firms choose to...