We study the impact of endogenous longevity on optimal tax progressivity and inequality in an overlapping generations model with skill heterogeneity. Higher tax progressivity decreases both the longevity gap and net income inequality, but at the expense of lower average lifetime and lower...

In our dynamic optimizing sticky price model, agents are heterogeneous with regard to their age and their productivity. We find that the business cycle dynamics in the OLG model in response to both a technology shock and a monetary shock are similar, but not completely identical to those found...

Empirically, the income share is procyclical for the low-income groups and acyclical for the top 5%. We find that business cycle models should consider overlapping generations and elastic labor supply in order to replicate this finding.

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

We compare the numerical methods that are most widely applied in the computation of the standard business cycle model with flexible labor. The numerical techniques imply economically insignificant differences with regard to business cycle summary statistics except for the volatility of...

In a sticky-price model with labor market search and habit persistence, Walsh (2005) shows that inertia in the interest rate policy helps to reconcile the inflation and output persistence with empirical observations for the US economy. We show that this finding is sensitive with regard to the...

Value function iteration is one of the standard tools for the solution of the Ramsey model. We compare six different ways of value function iteration with regard to speed and precision. We find that value function iteration with cubic spline interpolation between grid points dominates the other...

We describe an algorithm that is able to compute the solution of a singular linear difference system under rational expectations. The algorithm uses the Generalized Schur Factorization and is illustrated by a simple example.

Turnovsky (1995) derives in a continuous-time model of a decentralized economy that the correct specification of the firm's objective function is to maximize the initial value of its outstanding securities. The firm value is the discounted flow of real earnings. For the discrete-time version of...

The conditional equity premium in the model with production is often approximated by assuming a jointly log-normal distribution of the marginal rate of substitution in consumption and the marginal productivity of capital. We show that, for standard parameterization, this premium is about one...