This paper essentially puts together procedures that are used in the computation of equilibria in models with a very large number of heterogeneous agents. It is not a complete description of all procedures used in the literature. It describes procedures that deal with infinitely lived agent...

A necessary feature for equilibrium is that beliefs about the behavior of other agents are rational. We argue that in stationary OLG environments this implies that any future generation in the same situation as the initial generation must do as well as the initial generation did in that...

Abstract The United States relies for its government revenues more on the taxation of capital relative to the taxation of labor than countries in continental Europe do. In this paper we ask what can account for this. Our approach is to look at Markov perfect equilibria of a two-country growth...

In this paper, we use data of life insurance holdings by age, sex, and marital status to infer how individuals value consumption in different demographic stages. Essentially, we use revealed preference to estimate equivalence scales and altruism simultaneously in the context of a fully specified...

The authors study, theoretically and quantitatively, the general equilibrium of an economy in which households smooth consumption by means of both a riskless asset and unsecured loans with the option to default. The default option resembles a bankruptcy filing under Chapter 7 of the U.S....

We propose a theory of unsecured debt that is based on the existence of private information about a person's type and on the fact that some debtors have the incentive to forego bankruptcy in order to signal their type. The theory formalizes the idea that the type of a person is relevant to...

We build a variation of the neoclassical growth model in which financial shocks to households or wealth shocks (in the sense of wealth destruction) generate recessions. Two standard ingredients that are necessary are (1) the existence of adjustment costs that make the expansion of the tradable...

Large and persistent global financial imbalances need not be the harbinger of a world financial crash. Instead, we show that these imbalances can be the outcome of financial integration when countries differ in financial markets deepness. In particular, countries with more advanced financial...

In standard models of the balance of payments, crises occur when investors begin to doubt the credibility of the government's commitment to its exchange rate policy. In this paper, we develop an alternative model in which balance of payments crises occur even if the credibility of government...

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS -- TABLES -- PREFACE -- CONTRIBUTORS -- 1. Economic Growth and Business Cycles -- 2. Recursive Methods for Computing Equilibria of Business Cycle Models -- 3. Computing Equilibria of Nonoptimal Economies -- 4. Models with Heterogeneous Agents -- 5....