Abstract The United States relies for its government revenues more on the taxation of capital relative to the taxation of labor than countries in continental Europe do. In this paper we ask what can account for this. Our approach is to look at Markov perfect equilibria of a two-country growth...

We study a positive theory of stagnation and growth aimed at understanding the large variations in growth outcomes across actual economies. The theory points to the fundamental role played by vested interests in determining policies which are key to the growth process: some agents seek to...

This paper studies the implications of taxing overtime work to reduce the workweek. We study the roles played by team work, commuting costs and idiosyncratic output risk in determining the choice of the workweek. To obtain reliable estimates, we calibrate the model to the substitutability...

We show that a theory of earnings and wealth inequality, based on the optimal choices of ex ante identical households that face uninsured idiosyncratic shocks to their endowments of efficiency labor units, accounts for the U.S. earnings and wealth inequality almost exactly.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS -- TABLES -- PREFACE -- CONTRIBUTORS -- 1. Economic Growth and Business Cycles -- 2. Recursive Methods for Computing Equilibria of Business Cycle Models -- 3. Computing Equilibria of Nonoptimal Economies -- 4. Models with Heterogeneous Agents -- 5....