We present a model of long-duration collateralized debt with risk of default. Applied to the housing market, it can match the homeownership rate, the average foreclosure rate, and the lower tail of the distribution of home-equity ratios across homeowners prior to the recent crisis. We stress the...

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...

We compute the optimal non-linear tax policy for a dynastic economy with uninsurable risk, where generations are linked by dynastic wealth accumulation and correlated incomes. Unlike earlier studies, we take full account of the welfare distribution along the transition to the new steady state...

This paper studies the impact of dividend and corporate income taxes on investment and asset returns in a stochastic general equilibrium model. Under the "new" view of dividend taxation (e.g. Poterba and Summers, 1985), proportional dividend taxes do not distort investment decisions, and thus...

This paper makes three contributions: First, I construct annual time series of gross domestic investment and national saving in the U.S. for the 1897–1949 period using historical component series. I compare the qualitative and quantitative properties of the newly constructed series with the...

How does the persistence of earnings change over the life cycle? Do workers at different ages face the same variance of idiosyncratic earnings shocks? This paper proposes a novel specification for residual earnings that allows for an age profile in the persistence and variance of labor income...

In this paper I analyze the effects of innovations in information technology on the mortgage and housing markets using a life-cycle model with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic income, as well as moving and house price shocks. I explicitly model the housing tenure choices of households....

I study the asset pricing implications and the efficiency of a tractable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets along the lines of Krebs [Krebs, T., 2003. Human Capital Risk and Economic Growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(2),...

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...