An examination of the business cycle implications of productive public capital in a two-sector, dynamic general-equilibrium model with optimal fiscal policy. In simulations, public investment and public consumption move procyclically, and the capital tax is more variable than the labor...

A presentation of a quantitative-theoretical model that can account for much of the behavior of the stock of public capital in the U.S. economy over the last 70 years, with an application to examining some possible causes of the slowdown in the growth of U.S. labor productivity.

We show that the steady-state optimal tax on capital income can be negative, positive, or zero in a neoclassical growth model that allows for imperfectly competitive product markets. The sign of the optimal tax rate depends crucially on (1) the degree of monopoly power, (2) the extent to which...

This paper investigates how concentrated ownership of capital influences the pricing of risky assets in a production economy. The model is designed to approximate the skewed distribution of wealth and income in U.S. data. I show that concentrated ownership significantly magnifies the equity risk...

This paper examines the quantitative relationship between the elasticity of capital-labor substitution and the conditions needed for equilibrium indeterminacy (and belief-driven fluctuations) in a one-sector neoclassical growth model. Our analysis employs a “normalized” version of the CES...

This paper develops a general-equilibrium model of skill-biased technological change that approximates the observed shifts in the shares of wage and non-wage income going to the top decile of U.S. households since 1980. Under realistic assumptions, we find that all agents can benefit from the...