Research Database

Many U.S. households have significant wealth late in life, contrary to the predictions of a simple life-cycle model. In this paper, we document stark differences between U.S. and Sweden regarding out-of-pocket medical and long-term-care expenses late in life, and use them to investigate their role in discouraging the elderly from dissaving. Using a consumption-saving model in retirement with significant uninsurable expense risk, we find that medical expense risk accounts for a quarter of the U.S.-Sweden difference in retirees' dissaving patterns. Furthermore, medical expense risk affects primarily financial assets, while its impact on housing is limited.

While the savings of retired singles tend to fall with age, those of retired couples tend to rise. We estimate a rich model of retired singles and couples with bequest motives and uncertain longevity and medical expenses. Our estimates imply that while medical expenses are an important driver of the savings of middle-income singles, bequest motives matter for couples and high-income singles, and generate transfers to non-spousal heirs whenever a household member dies. The interaction of medical expenses and bequest motives is a crucial determinant of savings for all retirees. Hence, to understand savings, it is important to model household structure, medical expenses, and bequest motives.

We study optimal savings policies when there is a dual concern about undersaving for retirement and income inequality. Agents differ in present bias and earnings ability, both unobservable to a planner with paternalistic and redistributive motives. We characterize the solution to this two-dimensional screening problem and provide a decentralization using realistic policy instruments: mandatory savings at low incomes but a choice between subsidized savings vehicles at high incomes—resembling Social Security, 401(k), and IRA accounts in the US. Offering more savings choice at higher incomes facilitates redistribution. To solve large-scale versions of this problem numerically, we propose a general, computationally stable, and efficient active-set algorithm. Relative to the current US retirement system, we find significant welfare gains from increasing mandatory savings and limiting savings choice at low incomes.

We develop a job ladder model with labor reallocation across firms and regions, and estimate it on matched employer-employee data to study the large and persistent real wage gap between East and West Germany. We find that the wage gap is mostly due to firms paying higher wages per efficiency unit in West Germany and quantify a rich set of frictions preventing worker reallocation across space and across firms. We find that three spatial barriers impede East Germans’ ability to migrate West: migration costs, a preference to live in the East, and fewer job opportunities received from the West. The estimated model highlights that the spatial barriers needed to generate the large wage gap between East and West are small relative to the frictions preventing the reallocation of labor across firms. Therefore, policies that directly promote regional integration lead to smaller aggregate benefits than equally costly hiring subsidies within region.

Why do young firms pay less? Using confidential microdata from the US Census Bureau, we find lower earnings among workers at young firms. However, we argue that such measurement is likely subject to worker and firm selection. Exploiting the two-sided panel nature of the data to control for relevant dimensions of worker and firm heterogeneity, we uncover a positive and significant young-firm pay premium. Furthermore, we show that worker selection at firm birth is related to future firm dynamics, including survival and growth. We tie our empirical findings to a simple model of pay, employment, and dynamics of young firms.

Tracking human activity in real time and at fine spatial scale is particularly valuable during episodes such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we discuss the suitability of smartphone data for quantifying movement and social contact. We show that these data cover broad sections of the US population and exhibit movement patterns similar to conventional survey data. We develop and make publicly available a location exposure index that summarizes county-to-county movements and a device exposure index that quantifies social contact within venues. We use these indices to document how pandemic-induced reductions in activity vary across people and places.

Over the last two decades, the literature on comparative development has moved from country-level to within-country analyses. The questions asked have expanded, as economists have used satellite images of light density at night and other big spatial data to proxy for development at the desired level. The focus has also shifted from uncovering correlations to identifying causal relations, using elaborate econometric techniques including spatial regression discontinuity designs. In this survey we show how the combination of geographic information systems with insights from disciplines ranging from the earth sciences to linguistics and history has transformed the research landscape on the roots of the spatial patterns of development. We discuss the limitations of the luminosity data and associated econometric techniques and conclude by offering some thoughts on future research.

Defaults have been shown to have a powerful effect on retirement saving behavior yet there is limited research on who is most affected by defaults and whether this varies based on features of the choice environment. Using administrative data on employer-sponsored retirement accounts linked to survey data, we estimate the relationship between retirement saving choices and individual characteristics – long-term discounting, present bias, financial literacy, and exponential-growth bias – under two distinct choice environments: an opt-in regime and an auto-enrollment regime. Consistent with our conceptual model, we find that the determinants of following the default and contribution behavior are regime-specific. Under the opt-in regime, financial literacy plays an important role in predicting total contributions, active saving choices, and maxing out contributions in the tax-preferred account. In contrast, under the auto-enrollment regime, present bias is the most significant behavioral predictor of contribution behavior. A causal interpretation of the estimates suggests that auto-enrollment increases saving primarily among those with low financial literacy.

We harmonize the results of 42 different data sets and studies dating back to the early 20th century to construct a time series of college attendance patterns for the United States. We find an important reversal around the time of World War II: before that time, family characteristics such as income were the better predictor of college attendance; afterwards, academic ability was the better predictor. We construct a model of college choice that can explain this reversal. The model's central mechanism is an exogenous rise in the demand for college that leads better colleges to become oversubscribed. These colleges institute selective admissions and raise their quality relative to the remaining colleges, as in Hoxby (2009). Rising quality at better colleges attracts high-ability students, while falling quality at the remaining colleges dissuades low-ability students, generating the reversal.

The location of individuals determines their job opportunities, living amenities, and housing costs. We argue that it is useful to conceptualize the location choice of individuals as a decision to invest in a ‘location asset’. This asset has a cost equal to the location’s rent, and a payoff through better job opportunities and, potentially, more human capital for the individual and her children. As with any asset, savers in the location asset transfer resources into the future by going to expensive locations with good future opportunities. In contrast, borrowers transfer resources to the present by going to cheap locations that offer few other advantages. As in a standard portfolio problem, holdings of this asset depend on the comparison of its rate of return with that of other assets. Differently from other assets, the location asset is not subject to borrowing constraints, so it is used by individuals with little or no wealth that want to borrow. We provide an analytical model to make this idea precise and to derive a number of related implications, including an agent’s mobility choices after experiencing negative income shocks. The model can rationalize why low wealth individuals locate in low income regions with low opportunities even in the absence of mobility costs. We document the investment dimension of location, and confirm the core predictions of our theory with French individual panel data from tax returns.

For whom has earnings risk changed, and why? To answer these questions, we develop a filtering method that estimates parameters of an income process and recovers persistent and temporary earnings for every individual at every point in time. Our estimation flexibly allows for first and second moments of shocks to depend upon observables as well as spells of zero earnings (i.e., unemployment) and easily integrates into theoretical models. We apply our filter to a unique linkage of 23.5m SSA-CPS records. We first demonstrate that our earnings-based filter successfully captures observable shocks in the SSA-CPS data, such as job switching and layoffs. We then show that despite a decline in overall earnings risk since the 1980s, persistent earnings risk has risen for both employed and unemployed workers, while temporary earnings risk declined. Furthermore, the size of persistent earnings losses associated with full year unemployment has increased by 50%. Using geography, education, and occupation information in the SSA-CPS records, we refute hypotheses related to declining employment prospects among routine and low-skill workers as well as spatial theories related to the decline of the Rust-Belt. We show that rising persistent earnings risk is concentrated among high-skill workers and related to technology adoption. Lastly, we find that rising persistent earnings risk while employed (unemployed) leads to welfare losses equivalent to 1.8% (0.7%) of lifetime consumption, and larger persistent earnings losses while unemployed lead to a 3.3% welfare loss.

This paper introduces a new long-run dataset based on archival data from historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances. The household-level data allow us to study the joint distributions of household income and wealth since 1949. We expose the central importance of portfolio composition and asset prices for wealth dynamics in postwar America. Asset prices shift the wealth distribution because the composition and leverage of household portfolios differ systematically along the wealth distribution. Middle-class portfolios are dominated by housing, while rich households predominantly own equity. An important consequence is that the top and the middle of the distribution are affected differentially by changes in equity and house prices. Housing booms lead to substantial wealth gains for leveraged middle-class households and tend to decrease wealth inequality, all else equal. Stock market booms primarily boost the wealth of households at the top of the distribution. This race between the equity market and the housing market shaped wealth dynamics in postwar America and decoupled the income and wealth distribution over extended periods. The historical data also reveal that no progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years, and that close to half of all American households have less wealth today in real terms than the median household had in 1970.

This paper analyzes the optimal response of the social insurance system to a rise in labor market risk. To this end, we develop a tractable macroeconomic model with risk-free physical capital, risky human capital (labor market risk) and unobservable effort choice affecting the distribution of human capital shocks (moral hazard). We show that constrained optimal allocations are simple in the sense that they can be found by solving a static social planner problem. We further show that constrained optimal allocations are the equilibrium allocations of a market economy in which the government uses taxes and transfers that are linear in household wealth/income. We use the tractability result to show that an increase in labor market (human capital) risk increases social welfare if the government adjusts the tax-and-transfer system optimally. Finally, we provide a quantitative analysis of the secular rise in job displacement risk in the US and find that the welfare cost of not adjusting the social insurance system optimally can be substantial.

We investigate cyclicality of variance and skewness of household labor income risk using PSID data. There are five main findings. First, we find that head's labor income exhibits countercyclical variance and procyclical skewness. Second, the cyclicality of hourly wages is muted, suggesting that head's labor income risk is mainly coming from the volatility of hours. Third, younger households face stronger cyclicality of income volatility than older ones, although the level of volatility is lower for the younger ones. Fourth, while a second earner helps lower the level of skewness, it does not mitigate the volatility of household labor income risk. Meanwhile, government taxes and transfers are found to mitigate the level and cyclicality of labor income risk volatility. Finally, among heads with strong labor market attachment, the cyclicality of labor income volatility becomes weaker, while the cyclicality of skewness remains.

We estimate the effect of industrial robots on employment, wages, and the composition of jobs in German labor markets between 1994 and 2014. We find that the adoption of industrial robots had no effect on total employment in local labor markets specializing in industries with high robot usage. Robot adoption led to job losses in manufacturing that were offset by gains in the business service sector. We analyze the impact on individual workers and find that robot adoption has not increased the risk of displacement for incumbent manufacturing workers. They stay with their original employer, and many workers adjust by switching occupations at their original workplace. The loss of manufacturing jobs is solely driven by fewer new jobs for young labor market entrants. Moreover, we find that, in regions with higher exposure to automation, labor productivity increases while the labor share in total income declines.

We offer causal evidence of higher returns to experience in big cities. Exploiting a natural experiment that settled refugees across labor markets in Denmark between 1986 and 1998, we find that refugees initially earn similar wages across locations. However, those placed in Copenhagen exhibit 35% faster wage growth with each additional year of experience. Faster sorting of workers towards the type of establishments, occupations, and industries typically found in cities accounts for the vast majority of this urban wage growth premium.

This paper uses a unique large-scale survey administered in April 2020 to assess disparities on several dimensions of wellbeing under rising COVID-19 infections and mitigation restrictions in the US. The survey includes three modules designed to assess different dimensions of well-being in parallel: physical health, mental and social health, and economic and financial security. The survey is unique among early COVID-19 data efforts in that provides insight on diverse dimensions of wellbeing and for subnational geographies. I find dramatic declines in wellbeing from pre-COVID baseline measures across both people and places. Place-level variation is not well explained by local characteristics that either precede or coincide with the pandemic. Analysis by demographic groups also shows large and unequal declines in wellbeing in the COVID era. Hispanic, younger, and lower-earning individuals all faced disproportionately worsening economic conditions, as did those with school-aged children. I conclude that place-based relief policies are unlikely to be efficient relative to support targeted to the neediest individuals. I also find that individual COVID-19 exposure and risk show concerning relationships with employment, protective behavior, and mental health. Those with direct COVID-19 exposure through their households continue working similar hours to others, and those with recent fever symptoms or elevated risk for COVID complications are not reducing their work hours or taking additional precautions, despite negative mental health status changes indicating concern. These findings suggest that some support policies might be directly targeted to households with confirmed infections or heighted risk.

We document new facts about risk in male wages and earnings, household earnings, and pre- and post-tax income in the Netherlands and the United States. We find that, in both countries, earnings display important deviations from the typical assumptions of linearity and normality. Individual-level male wage and earnings risk is relatively high at the beginning and end of the working life, and for those in the lower and upper parts of the income distribution. Hours are the main driver of the negative skewness and, to a lesser extent, the high kurtosis of earnings changes. Even though we find no evidence of added-worker effects, the presence of spousal earnings reduces the variability of household income compared to that of male earnings. In the Netherlands, government transfers are a major source of insurance, substantially reducing the standard deviation, negative skewness, and kurtosis of income changes. In the U.S. the role of family insurance is much larger than in the Netherlands. Family and government insurance reduce, but do not eliminate nonlinearities in household disposable income by age and previous earnings in either country.

We study the impact of increased pandemic-related childcare responsibilities on custodial mothers by telework compatibility of their job. We estimate changes in employment outcomes of these mothers in a difference-in-difference framework relative to prime-age women without children and a triple-difference framework relative to prime-age custodial fathers. Mothers' labor force participation decreased between 0.1 to 1.5 percentage points (ppts) relative to women without dependent children and 0.3 to 2.0 ppts compared to custodial fathers. Conditional on being in the labor force, the probability of being unemployed fell by 0.7 ppts relative to childless women. Conditional on being employed, leave take-up increased by 0.7 ppts. These patterns were especially prominent among custodial mothers with a college degree or higher in telework-compatible jobs. Compared to women without children, mothers working as teachers and white-collar workers disproportionately left the labor market at the end of the 2020-2021 virtual school year. These mothers likely struggled balancing remote work while simultaneously supporting their children's virtual schooling needs. The disparity between mothers and fathers widened over time, indicating the prevalence of inequality in sharing household duties even today. By the start of the 2021-2022 school year, eighteen months after the pandemic began, mothers' employment was still adversely impacted by childcare disruptions. Our findings emphasize that while flexible work has been shown to increase women's labor supply, it is not sufficient to ensure continued and increasing levels of women's labor force participation if accessible and affordable childcare is unavailable while they work for pay.

I examine the impact of the COVID-19 shock on parents' labor supply during the initial stages of the pandemic. Using difference-in-difference estimation and monthly panel data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), I compare labor market attachment, non-work activity, hours worked, and earnings and wages of those in areas with early school closures and stay-in-place orders with those in areas with delayed or no pandemic closures. While there was no immediate impact on detachment or unemployment, mothers with jobs in early closure states were 68.8 percent more likely than mothers in late closure states to have a job but not be working as a result of early shutdowns. There was no effect on working fathers or working women without school age children. Mothers who continued working increased their work hours relative to comparable fathers; this effect, however, appears entirely driven by a reduction in fathers’ hours worked. Overall, the pandemic appears to have induced a unique immediate juggling act for working parents of school age children. Mothers took a week of leave from formal work; fathers working fulltime, for example, reduced their hours worked by 0.53 hours over the week. While experiences were different for mothers and fathers, each are vulnerable to scarring and stunted opportunities for career growth and advancement due to the pandemic.

Just as employers face uncertainty when hiring workers, workers also face uncertainty when accepting employment, and bad employers may opportunistically depart from expectations, norms, and laws. However, prior research in economics and information sciences has focused sharply on the employer’s problem of identifying good workers rather than vice versa. This issue is especially pronounced in markets for gig work, including online labor markets, where platforms are developing strategies to help workers identify good employers. We build a theoretical model for the value of such reputation systems and test its predictions in on Amazon Mechanical Turk, where employers may decline to pay workers while keeping their work product and workers protect themselves using third-party reputation systems, such as Turkopticon. We find that: (1) in an experiment on worker arrival, a good reputation allows employers to operate more quickly and on a larger scale without loss to quality; (2) in an experimental audit of employers, working for good-reputation employers pays 40 percent higher effective wages due to faster completion times and lower likelihoods of rejection; and (3) exploiting reputation system crashes, the reputation system is particularly important to small, good-reputation employers, which rely on the reputation system to compete for workers against more established employers. This is the first clean field evidence of the effects of employer reputation in any labor market and is suggestive of the special role that reputation-diffusing technologies can play in promoting gig work, where conventional labor and contract laws are weak.

This paper examines the price of basic staples in rural Mexico. We document that nonlinear pricing in the form of quantity discounts is common, that quantity discounts are sizable for typical staples, and that the well-known conditional cash transfer program Progresa has significantly increased quantity discounts, although the program, as documented in previous studies, has not affected on average unit prices. To account for these patterns, we propose a model of price discrimination that nests those of Maskin and Riley (1984) and Jullien (2000), in which consumers differ in their tastes and, because of subsistence constraints, in their ability to pay for a good. We show that under mild conditions, a model in which consumers face heterogeneous subsistence or budget constraints is equivalent to one in which consumers have access to heterogeneous outside options. We rely on known results (Jullien (2000)) to characterize the equilibrium price schedule, which is nonlinear in quantity. We analyze the effect of nonlinear pricing on market participation as well as the impact of a market-wide transfer, analogous to the Progresa one, when consumers are differentially constrained. We show that the model is structurally identified from data on prices and quantities from a single market under common assumptions. We estimate the model using data from municipalities and localities in Mexico on three commonly consumed commodities. Interestingly, we find that nonlinear pricing is beneficial to a large number of households, including those consuming small quantities, relative to linear pricing mostly because of the higher degree of market participation that nonlinear pricing induces. We also show that the Progresa transfer has affected the slopes of the price schedules of the three commodities we study, which have become steeper as consistent with our model, leading to an increase in the intensity of price discrimination. Finally, we show that a reduced form of our model, in which the size of quantity discounts depends on the hazard rate of the distribution of quantities purchased in a village, accounts for the shift in price schedules induced by the program.

This essay distills the differences between zero inflation proponents and critics to three main questions: Can the central bank make a credible commitment to maintaining a stable price level? Should monetary policy be used to reduce the tax on capital income? And would reducing uncertainty about inflation produce significant social benefits? Proponents of zero inflation answer all three questions yes, while critics answer no. The essay reviews both answers for each question and suggests that the disagreements are at least partly due to inadequacies in economic models. The essay repeats the author's view, argued in an earlier study, that when other policy options are considered, the overall benefits of a zero inflation policy shrink close to zero, and may even become negative.

This paper analyzes the U.S. congressional proposal to instruct the Federal Reserve to, in the next five years, lower inflation to zero from its current rate of around 5 percent. The paper concludes that, when other policy options are considered, the zero inflation policy is not advisable. Its benefits would be very small—possibly negative—while its costs would probably be significant. Other, more direct policy options could produce most of the same benefits with fewer costs. Among these alternative policies are deregulating interest rates on demand deposits, paying interest on financial institution reserves, lowering the federal tax rate on capital income, and indexing the federal tax code to inflation.

This article contends that the various measures of the contribution of technology shocks to business cycles calculated using the real business cycle modeling method are not corroborated. The article focuses on a different and much simpler method for calculating the contribution of technology shocks, which takes account of facts concerning the productivity/labor input correlation and the variability of labor input relative to output. Under several standard assumptions, the method predicts that the contribution of technology shocks must be large (at least 78 percent), that the labor supply elasticity need not be large to explain the observed fluctuation in labor input, and that the contribution of technology shocks can be estimated fairly precisely. The method also estimates that the contribution of technology shocks could be lower than 78 percent under alternative assumptions.

Many would say that children are society’s most precious resource. So, how should it invest in them? To gain insight into this question, a dynamic general equilibrium model is developed where children differ by ability. Parents invest time and money in their offspring, depending on their altruism. This allows their children to grow up as more productive adults. First, the efficient allocation for the framework is characterized. Next, this is compared with the case of incomplete financial markets. Then, the situation where childcare markets are also lacking is examined. Additionally, the effects of impure altruism are analyzed.

We revisit the causes, welfare consequences, and policy implications of the dispersion in households' labor market outcomes using a model with uninsurable risk, incomplete asset markets, and home production. Allowing households to be heterogeneous in both their disutility of home work and their home production efficiency, we find that home production amplifies welfare-based differences meaning that inequality in standards of living is larger than we thought. We infer significant home production efficiency differences across households because hours working at home do not covary with consumption and wages in the cross section of households. Heterogeneity in home production efficiency is essential for inequality, as home production would not amplify inequality if differences at home only reflected heterogeneity in disutility of work.

We study the evolution of individual labor earnings over the life cycle using a large panel data set of earnings histories drawn from U.S. administrative records. Using fully nonparametric methods, our analysis reaches two broad conclusions. First, earnings shocks display substantial deviations from lognormality–the standard assumption in the incomplete markets literature. In particular, earnings shocks display strong negative skewness and extremely high kurtosis–as high as 30 compared with 3 for a Gaussian distribution. The high kurtosis implies that in a given year, most individuals experience very small earnings shocks, and a small but non-negligible number experience very large shocks. Second, these statistical properties vary significantly both over the life cycle and with the earnings level of individuals. We also estimate impulse response functions of earnings shocks and find important asymmetries: positive shocks to high-income individuals are quite transitory, whereas negative shocks are very persistent; the opposite is true for low-income individuals. Finally, we use these rich sets of moments to estimate econometric processes with increasing generality to capture these salient features of earnings dynamics.

In this paper, we ask how bankruptcy law affects the financial decisions of corporations and its implications for firm dynamics. According to current U.S. law, firms have two bankruptcy options: Chapter 7 liquidation and Chapter 11 reorganization. Using Compustat data, we first document capital structure and investment decisions of non-bankrupt, Chapter 11, and Chapter 7 firms. Using those data moments, we then estimate parameters of a general equilibrium firm dynamics model with endogenous entry and exit to include both bankruptcy options. Finally, we evaluate a bankruptcy policy change similar to one recommended by the American Bankruptcy Institute that amounts to a "fresh start" for bankrupt firms. We find that changes to the law can have sizable consequences for borrowing costs and capital structure which via selection affects productivity, as well as long run welfare.

The outreach of macroprudential policies is likely limited in practice by imperfect regulation enforcement, whether due to shadow banking, regulatory arbitrage, or other regulation circumvention schemes. We study how such concerns affect the design of optimal regulatory policy in a workhorse model in which pecuniary externalities call for macroprudential taxes on debt, but with the addition of a novel constraint that financial regulators lack the ability to enforce taxes on a subset of agents. While regulated agents reduce risk taking in response to debt taxes, unregulated agents react to the safer environment by taking on more risk. These leakages undermine the effectiveness of macroprudential taxes but do not necessarily call for weaker interventions. A quantitative analysis of the model suggests that aggregate welfare gains and reductions in the severity and frequency of financial crises remain, on average, largely unaffected by even significant leakages.

We propose a notion of smoothness of nonexpected utility functions, which extends the variational analysis of nonexpected utility functions to more general settings. In particular, our theory applies to state dependent utilities, as well as the multiple prior expected utility model, both of which are not possible in previous literatures. Other nonexpected utility models are shown to satisfy smoothness under more general conditions than the Fréchet and Gateaux differentiability used in the literature. We give more general characterizations of monotonicity and risk aversion without assuming state independence of utility function.

We seem to observe different patterns of exchange at different times and in different places. The first goal of this paper is to develop a model of money as a medium of exchange which allows multiple transaction patterns. A dynamic version of Shubik’s trading post economy is used, and it is shown that this economy allows a role for fiat money, and that fiat money can coexist with barter in exchange. There are multiple decentralized equilibria, and one of these resembles the equilibrium of a cash-in-advance economy—indeed, the model can be viewed as a generalization of the cash-in-advance framework. The second goal of the paper is to show that the present model can help explain why inflation seems far more disruptive and costly than what is implied by empirical studies on the cash-in-advance model. The argument for this is based on misestimations due to the unobservability of the patterns of exchange, which are variable in this model.

This study identifies the impact of access to and the speed of divorce on the welfare of children in a middle income largely Catholic country. Using difference-in-difference estimation techniques, I compare school enrollment for children of married and cohabiting parent households before and after the legalization of divorce. Implementing pro-homemaker divorce laws increased school enrollment anywhere from 3.4 to 5.5 percentage points, and the effect was particularly salient on secondary school students. I provide evidence that administrative processes influencing the speed of divorce affect household bargaining and investments in schooling. With every additional six months wait to the finalization of divorce, school enrollment decreased by approximately one percentage point. The impact almost doubles for secondary schooling. When contemplating development policies, advocates, policymakers, and leaders should not overlook the impact changes in family policies and administrative processes can have on advancements in child welfare and, ultimately, economic development.

This paper provides intertemporal general-equilibrium investigation of the welfare and employment consequences of Europe’s move to a unified market, using a multicountry, multisector applied model with imperfect competition, increasing returns-to-scale, and product differentiation at the firm level. The oligopolistic game between firms is assumed to be Nash in output. In the short-term, market imperfections (such as oligopolistic profits and wage rigidities) may exist. These imperfections vanish in the long run, characterized by stock-flow equilibrium consistent with steady-state growth. “Europe 1992” is interpreted as the elimination of the possibility for oligopolistic firms to price-discriminate between client countries within the European Community. Investigations are performed under alternative wage determination mechanisms (flexible wages v.s. wage indexation). We show, among other things, that the gains remain modest when dynamic effects are taken into account, and that all member countries are not sure to gain from European integration in the long run.

Prior to 1863, state-chartered banks in the United States issued notes–dollar-denominated promises to pay specie to the bearer on demand. Although these notes circulated at par locally, they usually were quoted at a discount outside the local area. These discounts varied by both the location of the bank and the location where the discount was being quoted. Further, these discounts were asymmetric across locations, meaning that the discounts quoted in location A on the notes of banks in location B generally differed from the discounts quoted in location B on the notes of banks in location A. Also, discounts generally increased when banks suspended payments on their notes. In this paper we construct a random matching model to qualitatively match these facts about banknote discounts. To attempt to account for locational differences, the model has agents that come from two distinct locations. Each location also has bankers that can issue notes. Banknotes are accepted in exchange because banks are required to produce when a banknote is presented for redemption and their past actions are public information. Overall, the model delivers predictions consistent with the behavior of discounts.

We study the quantitative properties of constrained efficient allocations in an environment where risk sharing is limited by the presence of private information. We consider a life cycle version of a standard Mirrlees economy where shocks to labor productivity have a component that is public information and one that is private information. The presence of private shocks has important implications for the age profiles of consumption and income. First, they introduce an endogenous dispersion of continuation utilities. As a result, consumption inequality rises with age even if the variance of the shocks does not. Second, they introduce an endogenous rise of the distortion on the marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure over the life cycle. This is because, as agents age, the ability to properly provide incentives for work must become less and less tied to promises of benefits (through either increased leisure or consumption) in future periods. Both of these features are also present in the data. We look at the data through the lens of our model and estimate the fraction of labor productivity that is private information. We find that for the model and data to be consistent, a large fraction of shocks to labor productivities must be private information.

We present and empirically implement an equilibrium labor market search model where risk averse workers facing medical expenditure shocks are matched with firms making health insurance coverage decisions. Our model delivers a rich set of predictions that can account for a wide variety of phenomenon observed in the data including the correlations among firm sizes, wages, health insurance offering rates, turnover rates and workers' health compositions. We estimate our model by Generalized Method of Moments using a combination of micro datasets including Survey of Income and Program Participation, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Employer Health Insurance Survey. We use our estimated model to evaluate the equilibrium impact of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) and find that it would reduce the uninsured rate among the workers in our estimation sample from about 22% in the pre-ACA benchmark economy to less than 4%. We also find that income-based premium subsidies for health insurance purchases from the exchange play an important role for the sustainability of the ACA; without the premium subsidies, the uninsured rate would be around 18%. In contrast, as long as premium subsidies and health insurance exchanges with community ratings stay intact, ACA without the individual mandate, or without the employer mandate, or without both mandates, could still succeed in reducing the uninsured rates to 7.34%, 4.63% and 9.22% respectively.

This article is a progress report on research that attempts to include one type of market incompleteness and frictions in macroeconomic models. The focus of the research is the absence of insurance markets in which individual-specific risks may be insured against. The article describes some areas where this type of research has been and promises to be particularly useful, including consumption and saving, wealth distribution, asset markets, business cycles, and fiscal policies. The article also describes work in each of these areas that was presented at a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in the fall of 1993.

This paper analyzes the U.S. congressional proposal to instruct the Federal Reserve to, in the next five years, lower inflation to zero from its current rate of around 5 percent. The paper concludes that, when other policy options are considered, the zero inflation policy is not advisable. Its benefits would be very small—possibly negative—while its costs would probably be significant. Other, more direct policy options could produce most of the same benefits with fewer costs. Among these alternative policies are deregulating interest rates on demand deposits, paying interest on financial institution reserves, lowering the federal tax rate on capital income, and indexing the federal tax code to inflation.

This study analyzes two monetary economies, a cash-credit good model and a limited-participation model. In these models, monetary policy is made by a benevolent policymaker who cannot commit to future policies. The study defines and analyzes Markov equilibrium in these economies and shows that there is no time-inconsistency problem for a wide range of parameter values.

This paper studies the outcome of fully insured random selections among multiple competitive equilibria. This defines an iterative procedure of reallocation which is Pareto improving at each step. The process converges to a unique Pareto optimal allocation in finitely many steps. The key requirement is that random selections be continuous, which is a generic condition for smooth exchange economies with strictly concave utility functions.

We study dynamic optimal taxation in a class of economies with private information. Constrained optimal allocations in these environments are complicated and history-dependent. Yet, we show that they can be implemented as competitive equilibria in market economies supplemented with simple tax systems. The market structure in these economies is similar to that in Bewley (1986): agents supply labor and trade risk-free claims to future consumption, subject to a budget constraint and a debt limit. Optimal taxes are conditioned only on two observable characteristics—an agent’s accumulated stock of claims, or wealth, and her current labour income—and they are not additively separable in these variables. The marginal wealth tax is decreasing in labour income and its expected value is generally positive. The marginal labour income tax is decreasing in wealth.

The current tool of choice for analyzing the impact of a potential North American Free Trade Agreement on the economies of Canada, Mexico, and the United States is the static applied general equilibrium model. Although this type of model can do a good job in analyzing, and even in predicting, the impact of trade liberalization or tax reform on relative prices and resource allocation over a short time horizon, it does not attempt to capture the impact of government policy on growth rates. For this we need a dynamic model. This paper outlines some of the issues that confront a researcher interested in building a dynamic general equilibrium model to assess the potential economic impact of a NAFTA, including the impact on growth rates. Simple calculations based on preliminary empirical work indicate that the dynamic benefits of increased openness could dwarf the static benefits found by more conventional applied general equilibrium models.