Aggregate expenditure on durables responds only slowly to wealth and other aggregate innovations. In this paper, the author develops new results on the problem of dynamic aggregation of stochastically heterogeneous units, which help to characterize the connection between microeconomic...

We explore the implications of a country's external constraint for the dynamics of net foreign assets, returns, and exchange rates. Deteriorations in external accounts imply future trade surpluses (trade channel) or excess returns on the net foreign portfolio (valuation channel). Using a new...

Economies with private information provide a rationale for capital taxation. In this paper we ask what the welfare gains from following this prescription are. We develop a method to answer this question in standard general equilibrium models with idiosyncratic uncertainty and incomplete markets....

We explore steady-state inequality in an intergenerational model with altruistically linked individuals who experience privately observed taste shocks. When the welfare function depends only on the initial generation, efficiency requires immiseration: inequality grows without bound and...

This paper is a normative investigation of the properties of optimal capital taxation in the neoclassical growth model with aggregate shocks and incomplete markets. The model features a representative-agent economy with linear taxes on labor and capital. I first allow the government to trade...