Using an intertemporal model of saving and capital accumulation we demonstrate that it is impossible for any binding minimum wage to increase the after-tax incomes of workers if the production function is Cobb-Douglas with constant returns to scale, or if there are no differences in ability...

This paper analyzes long run outcomes resulting from adopting a binding minimum wage in a neoclassical model with perfectly competitive labour markets and capital accumulation. The model distinguishes between workers of heterogeneous ability and capitalists who do all the saving, and it entails...

Recent criticism from different sides has expressed the view that, with scarce resources, there is little justification for massive public funding of higher education. Central to the debate is the conjecture that colleges and universities use their resources inefficiently and focus...

Weakening bargaining power of unions and the increasing integration of the world economy may affect the volatility of capital and labor incomes. This paper documents and explains changes in income volatility. Using a theoretical framework which builds distribution risk into a real business cycle...

Casual empiricism suggests that “unwarranted” wage changes, defined as the part of wage growth that is not explained by changes in labour productivity, are negatively associated with the return on capital. The main point of this paper is to show that “unwarranted” wage changes have no...

Using a heterogeneous agent model allowing for different degrees of complementarity between capital, skilled and unskilled labour, this paper evaluates supply-side reforms consistent with lower public debt-to-GDP in the long-run. We find that, relative to the other tax reforms, capital tax cuts...

The value of the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital (ó) is a “crucial” assumption in understanding the secular decline in labor share of income (Piketty (2014a), Karabarbounis and Neiman (2014)) and long-run growth (Solow, 1956). This paper begins by examining the role of...

This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any...

This paper proposes tests of policy ineffectiveness in the context of macroeconometric rational expectations models. It is assumed that there is a policy intervention that takes the form of changes in the parameters of a policy rule, and that there are sufficient observations before and after...

The stylized facts suggest a negative relationship between tax progressivity and the skill premium from the early 1960s until the early 1990s, and a positive one thereafter. They also generally imply rising tax progressivity, except for the 1980s. In this paper, we ask whether optimal tax policy...