We study a dynamic version of Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model of the size of government. Taxes are proportional to total income, and they are redistributed as equal lump-sum transfers. Voting takes place periodically over time, and each consumer votes for the tax rate that maximizes his...

The role that investment-specific technological change played in generating postwar U.S. growth is investigated here. The premise is that the introduction of new, more efficient capital goods is an important source of productivity change and an attempt is made to disentangle its effects from the...

We propose a new measure of frictional wage dispersion: the mean-min wage ratio. For a large class of search models, we show that this measure is independent of the wage-offer distribution but depends on statistics of labor-market turnover and on preferences. Under plausible preference...

We assess the empirical importance of changes in income and relative prices for structural transformation in the postwar United States. We explain two natural approaches to the data: sectors may be categories of final expenditure or value added; e.g., the service sector may be the final expenditure...

Many states are implementing school-finance reforms which will have complex effects on income distribution, intergenerational income mobility, and welfare. This paper analyzes the static and dynamic effects of such reforms by constructing a dynamic general equilibrium model of public-education...

We construct a family model of labor supply that features adjustment along both the intensive and extensive margin. Intensive margin adjsutment is restricted to two values: full-time work and part-time work. Using simulated data from the steady state of the calibrated model, we examine whether...

We consider two life cycle models of labor supply that use nonconvexities to generate retirement. In each case we derive a link between hours worked prior to retirement, the intertemporal elasticity of substitution for labor (IES), and the size of the nonconvexities. This link is robust to...