This paper provides an analytical characterization of Markov perfect equilibria in a model with repeated voting, where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution. A key result is that the future constituency for redistributive policies depends positively on current redistribution,...

Over the last two decades US aggregate wealth has fluctuated substantially. Against the backdrop of the Great Recession, the effects of these boom-and-bust cycles have come to dominate academic and policy discussions. How can we explain these fluctuations in wealth? Why are these fluctuations...

We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks. We define fundamental volatility as the volatility that would arise from an economy made entirely of idiosyncratic sectoral or firm-level shocks. Fundamental volatility...