We explore the effects of financial shocks in heterogeneous agent economies with aggregate savings and with frictions in some consumption markets, where demand contributes to productivity. Households of various wealth and earnings levels search for goods at different intensities and pay...

Recent cyclical episodes in the U.S. and G-7 economies are asymmetric: recoveries and expansions tend to be long and gradual and busts tend to be short and sharp. A large body of work views the two recent cyclical U.S. episodes, namely, the "new economy" boom in the late 1990s, and the 2000s...

Four options to make the social security sustainable under the coming demographic shift are presented; increase payroll taxes by 6 percentage points, reduce replacement rates by one-third, raise the normal retirement age to 73, or means-test the benefits and reduce them in income. The paper...

The objective of this paper is to understand how loan structure affects (i) the borrower's selection of a mortgage contract and (ii) the aggregate economy. We develop a quantitative equilibrium theory of mortgage choice where households can choose from a menu of long-term (norminal) mortgage...

Often an increase in the minimum wage is accompanied by a reduction in the capital tax. This paper analyzes the effects of interactions between the minimum wage and the capital tax in the general equilibrium framework. The analysis is conducted in an inter-temporal search model in which firms...

We use balance sheet and National Income and Products Accounts (NIPA) data to calibrate factor shares in a model with three factors (land, labor, and capital) and three sectors (business, household, and government). These estimates are used in an overlapping generations model with land to study...

The paper estimates a job search model with savings on Danish microdata that include observations on wealth and wages. Controlling for extensive observed and unobserved worker characteristics heterogeneity, the estimation relates observed unemployment spells to the model implied hazard rate for...

This paper quantifies the effects of social security on capital accumulation and wealth distribution in a life-cycle framework with altruistic individuals. The main findings of this paper are that the current U.S. social security system has a significant impact on capital accumulation and wealth...

We study the welfare implications of uncertainty in business cycle models. In the modern business cycle literature, multiplicative real shocks to production and/or preferences play an important role as the impulses that produce aggregate fluctuations. Introducing shocks in this way has the...

How do information flows influence business cycle dynamics in models with anticipated (news shocks) and unanticipated innovations? To address this question, we show how alternative specifications of news affect the equilibrium by deriving the mapping between news shocks and the endogenous...