Child labor is a persistent phenomenon in many developing countries. In recent years, support has been growing among rich-country governments and consumer groups for the use of trade policies, such as product boycotts and the imposition of international labor standards, to reduce child labor in...

This paper shows that a zero-sum redistribution of wealth within a country can have persistent aggregate effects. Motivated by the caseof an unanticipated inflation episode, we consider redistribution shocks that shift resources from old to young households. Aggregate effects arise because there...

One of the key social transformations that accompanied the British Industrial Revolution was the economic decline of the aristocracy. Standard theories of wealth inequality cannot explain why the aristocrats, in spite of their superior wealth and education, failed to be the main protagonists and...

We evaluate the asset pricing implications of a class of models in which risk sharing is imperfect because of limited enforcement of intertemporal contracts. Lustig (2004) has shown that in such a model the asset pricing kernel can be written as a simple function of the aggregate consumption...

Consumption models with endogenous debt constraints differ from standard incomplete markets models in their predictions about an individual household's ability to smooth consumption across time and states of the world. In this paper we develop these differences, both theoretically and...