The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) dictates that adverse events such as a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing must be removed from an individual's credit record after 10 years. The intent of the law is to provide partial consumption insurance by giving an individual a fresh start. However, the law...

This paper studies the quantitative implications of wealth taxation (as opposed to capital income taxation) in an incomplete markets model with return rate heterogeneity across individuals. The key source of heterogeneity comes from the fact that some individuals have better entrepreneurial...

The corporate income tax rate in the U.S. is almost forty percent. This high tax rate has been associated with depressing employment growth. Cutting or even eliminating corporate income tax has been proposed during the recent presidential campaigns based on the idea that a lower tax rate can...

Entrepreneurship is risky; entrepreneurs forgo wages and invest their time and resources into a business with large potential gains, but uninsurable risks. It is vital to know the extent of these risks, and the insurance available against them, in order to assess corporate tax and personal...

business cycles, and borrower default frequencies. The model is parameterized to match a set of key aggregate and cross-sectional statistics for the U.S. banking industry. As in the data, the model generates countercyclical interest rates on loans, bank failure rates, borrower default...

We propose a theory of unsecured consumer credit where: (i) borrowers have the legal option to default; (ii) defaulters are not exogenously excluded from future borrowing; (iii) there is free entry of lenders; and (iv) lenders cannot collude to punish defaulters. In our framework, limited credit...

This paper uses a dynamic political economy model to evaluate whether the observed rise in wage inequality can explain an increase in transfers and effective tax rates in the U.S. over the past two decades. Specifically, we assume that households have uninsurable idiosyncratic labor efficiency...

We study how credit scoring impacts the ability of individuals to consumption smooth. Our environment has ex-ante heterogeneity of household types. Credit scoring is interpreted as an intermediary's posterior of a household's type conditional on its bankruptcy and borrowing decisions. The...

This paper develops a political economy model to evaluate how inequality affects policies via the political process. The model is an extension of Krusell and Rios-Rull (1999) to incorporate uninsured idiosyncratic risk to income. Using this framework, we evaluate the response of social insurance...