Some existing welfare programs ("work-first") require participants to work in exchange for benefits. Others ("job search-first") emphasize private job-search and provide assistance in finding and retaining a durable employment. This paper studies the optimal design of welfare programs when (i)...

Some existing welfare programs ("work-first") require participants to work in exchange for benefits. Others ("job search-first") emphasize private job-search and provide assistance in finding and retaining a durable employment. This paper studies the optimal design of welfare programs when (i)...

There is a strong correlation between the corporate interest rate spread and the unemployment rate.We make two contributions to the literature based on this observation. First, we model the mechanisms by which these financial conditions can affect unemployment in a DMP model with capital....

We bring together the theories of duality and dynamic programming. We show that the dual of a separable dynamic optimization problem can be recursively decomposed. We provide a dual version of the principle of optimality and give conditions under which the dual Bellman operator is a contraction...

is monotone in output. We also investigate a few possibilities of relaxing these requirements.

Several frictions might prevent (or make undesirable) the full taxation of savings. Due to international capital mobility, for instance, the government may not have perfect control over agent's saving and consumption decisions. We show in this paper that a restricted ability to tax savings has...

We study optimal bequest and capital taxation over the life-cycle in an OLG model. In this environment, we show that the efficient allocation can be implemented via age-dependent linear taxes/subsidies on capital income and bequests. First, as long as the degree of self-control problem is weakly...

The question of how technological change affects labor markets is a classical one in macroeconomics. A standard framework for addressing this question is the matching model with vintage capital and exogenous technical progress. Within this framework, it has been argued that the impact of...