Federal legislation passed in the late 1980s greatly expanded the Medicaid program to include children in families with incomes at and above the poverty threshold, regardless of family structure. Using March Current Population Survey data, the author evaluates how the expansions affected private...

We quantify the connection between inequality and business cycles in a medium-scale New Keynesian model with tractable household heterogeneity, estimated with aggregate and cross-sectional data. We find that inequality substantially amplifies cyclical fluctuations. The primary source of this...

This paper characterizes the optimal taxation of top earners in a world with externalities. It takes a reduced-form approach that spans a broad class of models where top earners create externalities on the economy. The model allows for a flexible relationship between top earnings and the...

How does forced displacement shape development in origin countries? We examine the case of Venezuela, where over seven million people have been forcibly displaced. Our study compares municipalities with different proportions of foreign-born populations before and after the international oil...