Education and income are strong predictors of health and longevity. In the last 20 years many efforts have been made to understand if these relationships are causal and what the possible role of policy should be as a result. The evidence from various studies is ambiguous: the effects of...

We ask: what are the most efficient means of redistribution in an unequal society? We answer this question by characterizing the optimal shape of non-linear income and wealth taxes in a dynamic general equilibrium model with uninsurable idiosyncratic risk. Our analysis reproduces the...

Many of the most pernicious economic institutions and policies create entry barriers or manipulate factor prices to transfer resources from entrepreneurs and workers to groups that hold political power. These inefficiencies partly result from the fact that direct and efficient fiscal instruments...

Why do governments employ inefficient policies to redistribute income towards special interest groups (SIGs) when more efficient ones are available? To address this puzzle we derive and test predictions for a set of policies where detailed data is available and an efficiency ranking is feasible:...

We study the effects of immigration on native welfare in a general equilibrium model featuring two skill types, search frictions, wage bargaining, and a redistributive welfare state. Our quantitative analysis suggests that, in all 20 countries studied, immigration attenuates the effects of...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of capital controls, in particular the Chilean experience with the use of the unremunerated reserve requirement. We examine the effects on interest rates, real exchange rate, and the volume and composition of capital inflows. The effects are elusive and it...