This article studies socially optimal allocations, from the point of view of a benevolent social planner, in environments characterized by fixed resources, endogenous fertility, and full information. Individuals in our environment are fully rational and altruistic toward their descendants. Our...

Lucas (2004) asserts that Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution ... The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current...

U.S. labor markets are increasingly diverse and persistently unequal between genders, races and ethnicities, skill levels, and age groups. We use a structural model to decompose the observed differences in labor market outcomes across demographic groups in terms of underlying wedges in...

Official recession figures ignore the costs associated with the loss of human life due to COVID-19. This paper constructs "full recession" measures that take into account the death toll. Key for the estimates are the number of dead, the individual's willingness to accept mortality risk, and...

Theoretical studies have shown that under unorthodox assumptions on preferences and production technologies, collateral constraints can act as a powerful amplification and propagation mechanism of exogenous shocks. We investigate whether or not this result holds under more standard assumptions....

This article studies socially optimal allocations, from the point of view of a benevolent social planner, in environments characterized by fixed resources, endogenous fertility, and full information. Individuals in our environment are fully rational and altruistic toward their descendants. Our...