I study the impact of idiosyncratic risk on savings and employment in a small open economy populated by two-member families. Families incur a fixed cost of participation when both members are employed. Because of market incompleteness and information asymmetries, this cost coupled with labor...

With our book Saving and Investment in the Twenty-First Century: The Great Divergence (published as open access), we present a comprehensive theoretical explanation as well as empirical evidence for the phenomenon of low interest rates observed in the OECD countries and China and make various...

We develop a dynamic macroeconomic model in which the secular decline in real interest rates arises endogenously from rising wealth inequality. Challenging the standard "safe asset shortage" hypothesis, the model shows how falling real rates can coexist with a stable safe asset ratio--closely...

We quantify the impact of past and future global demographic change on real interest rates, house prices and household debt in an overlapping generations model. Falling birth and death rates can explain a large part of the fall in world real interest rates and the rise in house prices and...

This paper intends to discuss some problematic properties IS-LM and loanable funds together have when dealing with fiscal deficits. Many others have focused on its assumptions for criticism of IS-LM, but I will mainly focus on its fundamental modelling nature. To say more specifically, I will...

This paper presents a simple Ramsey-type model example where two infinitely-living agents have same utility function except for time preference, and shows that equilibrium is indeterminate that is to be interpreted as being non-existent. The issues regarding New Keynesian transversality...

We quantify the impact of demographic change on real interest rates, house prices and household debt in an overlapping-generations model. Falling birth and death rates across advanced economies can explain much of the observed fall in real interest rates and the rise in house prices and...

The Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that, unlike subprime borrowers, prime borrowers are more likely to own investment homes during recessions than during recoveries. Drawing on this empirical fact, we present and estimate a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model that distinguishes...

In the setting of a dynamic general equilibrium model we ask the following question: What happens if the interest rate is settled exogenously in a level that differs from the one which emerges from equilibria in the markets? Although the subject of the setting of the interest rate by an external...

Rietz (1988) and Barro (2006) subject consumption and dividends to rare disasters in the growth rate. We extend their framework and subject consumption and dividends to rare disasters in the growth persistence. Wemodel growth persistence by means of two hidden types of economic slowdowns:...