In this paper, I consider the problem of optimal unemployment insurance in a world in which the unemployed agent's job-finding effort is unobservable and his level of savings is unobservable. I show that the first-order approach is not always valid for this problem, and I argue that the...

In this paper, we demonstrate that it may be socially optimal for countries to have different currencies, even though they have no possibility of independently controlling their money supplies. We assume that agents have heterogeneous preferences over goods of different national origin, and that...

This paper presents stylized facts on labor supply, income, consumption, wealth, and several measures of consumption and income inequality drawn from the 1980-2006 Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) conducted by the Bank of Italy. The SHIW provides information on consumption, income...

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on "Cross Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists''. The issue documents, for nine countries, the level and the evolution, over time and over the life cycle, of several dimensions of economic inequality,...