Because of the recent surge in U.S. personal defaults, Congress is currently debating bankruptcy reform legislation requiring a means test for Chapter 7 filers. This paper explores the effects of such a reform in a model where, in contrast to previous work, bankruptcy options and production are...

Criticisms of endogenous growth models with flat rate taxes have highlighted two features that are not substantiated by the data. These models generally imply: (1) that economic growth must fall with the share of government expenditures in output across countries, and (2) that one-time shifts in...

Marshall made at least four contributions to the classical quantity theory. He endowed it with his Cambridge cash-balance money-supply-and-demand framework to explain how the nominal money supply relative to real money demand determines the price level. He combined it with the assumption of...

We study the impact of regional and sectoral productivity changes on the U.S. economy. To that end, we consider an environment that captures the effects of interregional and intersectoral trade in propagating disaggregated productivity changes at the level of a sector in a given U.S. state to...

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the nature of U.S. business cycles changed in important ways, as made evident by distinctive shifts in the comovement and relative volatilities of key economic aggregates. These include labor productivity, hours, output, and inventories. Unlike the widely documented...

We characterize Markov-perfect equilibria in a setting where the absence of government commitment affects the financing of productive public capital. We show that at any date, a government in office only considers intertemporal distortions over two consecutive periods in choosing taxes. We then...

We characterize the optimal financing of productive public capital and compute the welfare loss from being unable to commit to the Ramsey policy. Because this calculation ultimately relies on numerical approximations, we contrast alternative approaches. While perturbation and linear quadratic...

In the standard neoclassical model with a representative agent, a benevolent planner who can commit to future policies will, if feasible, levy a single confiscatory tax on capital in the initial period and commit never to set positive taxes thereafter. We show that this policy, which allows for...