In the United States, the percentage standard deviation of residential investment is more than twice that of non-residential investment. GDP, consumption, and both types of investment all co-move positively. At the industry level, output and hours worked in construction are more than three times...

Over the period 1972-1986, the U.S. business cycle was strongly correlated with the business cycle in the rest of the industrialized world. Over the period 1986-2000, international co-movement was much weaker (real regionalization). At the same time, U.S. international asset trade has increased...

This paper explores the macroeconomic and welfare implications of the sharp rise in U.S. wage inequality (1967-1996). In the data, cross-sectional earnings variation increased substantially more than wage variation, due to a sharp rise in the wage-hour correlation. At the same time, inequality...

We investigate the welfare implications of changing the mix between capital and labor taxes for a model economy in which heterogeneous households face uninsurable labor income risk. The stochastic process for labor earnings we construct is consistent with empirical estimates of earnings risk,...

What shapes the optimal degree of progressivity of the tax and transfer system? On the one hand, a progressive tax system can counteract inequality in initial conditions and substitute for imperfect private insurance against idiosyncratic earnings risk. At the same time, progressivity reduces...

We combine publicly available data from Freddie Mac, the Decennial Census of Housing, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis to construct the first constant-quality aggregate price index for the stock of residential land in the United States. We uncover five main results: (a) since 1970,...