Using a stylized two-period model we compare portfolio solutions from two local solution approaches - the approach of Judd and Guu (2001) and the approach of Devereux and Sutherland (2010, 2011) - with the true nonlinear portfolio solution.

This paper studies the effects of income taxation on entrepreneurship, empirically and in a structural macro model with entrepreneurial choice. Combining state-level tax data with household and firm data we document that higher and more progressive taxation has a strong negative impact on...

How much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing labor income taxes? In this paper we provide a quantitative answer to this question, and study the importance of the progressivity of the tax schedule for the ability of the government to generate tax revenues. We develop...

How much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing the level of labor income taxes? In this paper, we argue that the degree of tax progressivity is a quantitatively important determinant of the answer to this question. To make this point, we develop a large scale...

Americans work more than Europeans. Using micro data from the U.S. and 17 European countries, we study the contributions from demographic subgroups to these aggregate level differences. We document that women are typically the largest contributors to the discrepancy in work hours. We also...

We study the asset-pricing implications of changes in the variety of consumption goods which happens through free entry and exit of firms. Fluctuations in varieties drive a wedge between the measured and model-based (including variety growth) consumer price index making the pricing kernel as...

We explore the natural rate of interest, shortly r*, in emerging economies. If economic growth originates from convergence, then growth, say, from technological progress will be lower than we find in the data and, hence, r* will be lower. Ignoring convergence upwardly biases our estimates of r*...

TWe allow for heterogeneity in investors' ability to borrow from collateral in a Kiyotaki-Moore style macro model. We calibrate the model to match the quintiles of the distri- bution of leverage ratios of US non-financial firms. We show that financial amplification of the model with...

We present a two-country New Open Economy Macro model of the Austrian economy within the European Union's Economic & Monetary Union (EMU). The model includes both nominal and real frictions that have proven to be important in matching business cycle facts, and that allows for an investigation of...

A large literature attributes failure of uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) to the existence of a timevarying risk premium. This paper presents a mechanism in a simple two-country two-good endowment economy with incomplete markets that generates sizeable deviations from UIP. In a...