In a model with ex-ante homogenous households, earnings risk and a general earnings function, we derive the optimal linear labor tax rate and optimal linear education subsidies. The optimal income tax trades off social insurance against incentives to work and to invest in human capital....

This paper employs a two-period life-cycle model to derive the optimal tax policy when educational investments are subject to endogenous credit constraints. Credit constraints arise from the limited commitment of creditors to repay loans and from the moral hazard problem due to private...

To analyze the optimal social insurance package, we set up a two-period life-cycle model with risky human capital investment in which the government has access to labor taxation, education subsidies and capital taxation. Social insurance is provided by redistributive labor taxation. Moreover,...

We formulate a two-period life-cycle model of saving, labor supply, and human capital investments when individuals differ in ability and initial wealth. Borrowing constraints prevent individuals to optimally smooth consumption over the life-cycle and to optimally invest in human capital. We show...

The current financial crisis has brought Europe to a critical juncture. In this paper, we map the fiscally United States of Europe. We simulate an optimal EU-wide income tax and calculate the implied cross-country transfers. The comparison of the implied transfers with the real transfers shows...

This paper investigates the significance of dynamic conditional beta in predicting the cross-sectional variation in expected stock returns. The results indicate that the time-varying conditional beta is alive and well in the cross-section of daily stock returns. Portfolio-level analyses and...

This paper investigates how the stock market reacts to firm level liquidity shocks. We find that negative and persistent liquidity shocks not only lead to lower contemporaneous returns, but also predict negative returns for up to six months in the future. Long-short portfolios sorted on past...

Grazing leads to the reduction of biomass and plays a critical role in land degradation in arid and semiarid lands. However, the indirect effects of grazing on the ecosystem, e.g., the effect on seed dispersal, have not been well understood. In this study, we built an agent-based model (ABM) to...

This paper proposes new dynamic conditional futures hedge ratios and compares their hedging performances along with those of common benchmark hedge ratios across three broad asset classes. Three of the hedge ratios are based on the upward-biased carry cost rate hedge ratio, where each is...

In this paper, we construct a sample of news co-occurrences using big data technologies. We show that stocks that co-occur in news articles are less risky, bigger, and more covered by financial analysts, and economically-connected stocks are mentioned more often in the same news articles. We...