The authors use microdata from the 1999 and 2005 Surveys of Financial Security to identify changes in household debt, and discuss their potential implications for monetary policy and financial stability. They document an increase in the debt-income ratio, which rose from 0.75 to 0.95, on...

A body of recent research is pointing to a growing inequality in many countries. The current debate focuses on high income countries. However, developing countries are an important element in understanding the full picture. First, evidence indicates that growing inequality can also be observed...

We present theoretical and empirical results on consumption during an enmployment spell.

The coalition agreement of November 2013 includes a number of specific and ambitious goals relating to economic and social development. For instance, investment in infrastructure is to be increased and the income situation of certain groups of pensioners and employees improved through higher...

Using a Mortensen-Pissarides search-and-matching framework, this paper investigates the importance of search frictions in determining the welfare and distributional effects of tax reforms that re-allocate the tax burden from capital to labour income. Calibrating the model to the UK economy, we...

Industrial development is often accompanied by massive migration from agricultural to industrial areas. This paper compares two steady states, the first and the second, which emerge before and after the termination of such migration, respectively. The paper shows that 1) the employment rate must...

Empirical evidence shows that entrepreneurs hold a large fraction of wealth, have higher saving rates than workers, and face substantial uninsurable entrepreneurial and investment risks. This paper constructs a heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium model with uninsurable entrepreneurial risk...

This paper depicts the negative impact of a falling labour share caused by reduced bargaining power of workers on aggregate demand and employment. Contrary to standard New Keynesian models, the presence of consumers not participating in financial markets (rule of thumb consumers) causes an...

The U.S financial crisis started in October 2005. The level of new home starts would have replaced the total owner occupied housing stock in 37 years. Much faster than desirable. Mortgage interest rates also went up in same month. In 2006 mortgage lending went on unabated, but housing values did...