This paper examines the role for tax policies in productivity-shock driven economies with "catching-up-with -the-Joneses" utility functions. The optimal tax policy is shown to affect the economy counter-cyclically via procyclical taxes, i.e., "cooling down" the economy with higher taxes when it...

Campbell and Cochrane (1999) propose a preference specification that can explain a wide variety of asset pricing puzzles such as the high equity premium. They augment the basic power utility function with a time-varying subsistence level, or "habit", which is in the spirit of "catching up with...