We use market data on corporate bonds and equities to measure the value of U.S. corporate assets and their payouts to investors. In contrast to per share equity dividends, total corporate payouts are very volatile, turn negative when corporations raise capital, and are acyclical. This challenges...

This paper builds on our earlier work, Meltzer and Richard (1981), on the size of government. How does the distribution of income changes as an economy grows? To answer this question we build a model of a labor economy in which consumers have diverse productivity. The government imposes a linear...

This paper builds on our earlier work, Meltzer and Richard (1981), on the size of government. How does the distribution of income changes as an economy grows? To answer this question we build a model of a labor economy in which consumers have diverse productivity. The government imposes a linear...

This paper builds on our earlier work, Meltzer and Richard (1981), on the size of government. How does the distribution of income changes as an economy grows? To answer this question we build a model of a labor economy in which consumers have diverse productivity. The government imposes a linear...

This model uses three implicit states (Core CPI, the unemployment rate, and the quarterly growth rate of non-farm payrolls) which follow a multivariate continuous-time Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process. The instantaneous risk-free rate (Fed Funds) is set using a policy rule (following Black...