This paper develops an overlapping agents model with age-specific mortality rates. The analytical framework also nests Blanchard's (1985, Journal of Political Economy 82, 1095–1117) "perpetual youth" model as a special, though perhaps not realistic, case. With age specific mortality...

Investment booms and asset "bubbles" are often the consequence of heavily leveraged borrowing and speculations of persistent growth in asset demand. We show theoretically that dynamic interactions between elastic credit supply (due to leveraged borrowing) and persistent credit demand (due to...

This paper analyzes the welfare costs of business cycles when workers face uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. In accordance with the previous literature, this paper decomposes labor income risk into an aggregate and an idiosyncratic component, but in contrast to the previous...

Household-specific growth rates of the tax base imply that the timing of tax collections determines the distribution of tax burdens and wealth across households. Changes in fiscal policy do not only shift tax burdens across generations, but also within cohorts. Institutional deficit constraints...

Augmenting a standard Bewley model with an entrepreneurial sector and occupational heterogeneity allows us to study important channels through which fiscal policies affect aggregate variables, factor prices, wealth distribution and welfare. To disentangle the forces involved, we consider...

We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how Federal Income tax liabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts on the distributions of average taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxes paid and income, and...

This paper analyzes the dynamic behaviour of a two-sector model of endogenous growth with unproductive government spending. In this model, we prove that the subspace of the parameter space where the equilibrium exhibits indeterminacy is larger, the large the fraction of government revenues...

We study the effects of credit shocks in a model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financing constraints, and a realistic firm-size distribution. As entrepreneurial firms can grow only slowly and rely heavily on retained earnings to expand the size of their business, we show that, by reducing...

This paper considers the long-run distribution of capital holdings in a model with complete asset markets and progressive taxation. Households are assumed to be heterogeneous in their labor market productivity. We show that this model is capable of producing a nondegenerate determinate wealth...

This paper incorporates two features of housing in a life-cycle analysis of social security: housing as a durable good and housing market frictions. We find that both housing quantities and homeownership rates respond strongly to eliminating social security. Accordingly, the aggregate impacts of...