Using a comprehensive panel data set on U.S. households, we study the effects of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), the most substantive reform of personal bankruptcy in the United States since the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978. The 2005 legislation...

Until the early decades of the 20th century, women spent more than 60% of their prime-age years either pregnant or nursing. Since then, the introduction of infant formula reduced women's comparative advantage in infant care, by providing an effective breast milk substitute. In addition, improved...

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 attained as competitive equilibria in market economies supplemented with simple tax...

Cross-country evidence on inflation and inequality suggests that they are positively correlated. I explore the hypothesis that this correlation is the outcome of a distributional conflict underlying the determination of fiscal policy.

Abstract U.S. fertility rose from a low of 2.27 children for women born in 1908 to a peak of 3.21 children for women born in 1932. It dropped to a new low of 1.74 children for women born in 1949, before stabilizing for subsequent cohorts. We propose a novel explanation for this boom-bust...

This paper studies optimal taxation of entrepreneurial capital and financial assets in economies with private information. Returns to entrepreneurial capital are risky and depend on entrepreneurs’ effort, which is not observed. The presence of idiosyncratic risk in capital returns implies that...

The unemployment gender gap, defined as the difference between female and male unemployment rates, was positive until 1980. This gap virtually disappeared after 1980, except during recessions when men's unemployment rate always exceeds women's. We study the evolution of these gender differences...

We document three new facts about gender differences in executive compensation. First, female executives receive lower share of incentive pay in total compensation relative to males. This difference accounts for 93% of the gender gap in total pay. Second, the compensation of female executives...

This Paper studies the structure and time consistency of optimal monetary policy from a public finance perspective in an economy where agents differ in transaction patterns and asset holdings. I find that heterogeneity breaks the link between lack of government commitment and high inflation,...

This paper explores the hypothesis that gender wage differentials arise from the interaction between the intra-household allocation of labour and the contractual relation between firms and workers in the presence of private information on workers’ labour market attachment. In our model, if...