This paper investigates the welfare costs of business cycles in a heterogeneous agent, overlapping generations economy which is distinguished by idiosyncratic labor market risk. Aggregate variation arises both in terms of aggregate productivity shocks and countercyclical variation in the...

This paper employs a multi-country large scale Overlapping Generations model with uninsurable labor productivity and mortality risk to quantify the impact of the demographic transition towards an older population in industrialized countries on world-wide rates of return, international capital...

This paper studies how gradualism affects the welfare gains from trade, technology, and reforms. When people face adjustment frictions, gradual shocks create less adverse distributional effects in the short run. We show that there are welfare gains from inducing a more gradual transition via...

Demographic change has differential impacts on the welfare of current and future generations. In a simple closed economy, aging -- a relative scarcity of young workers -- increases wages, increasing the welfare of the young. At the same time, population aging will reduce rates of return to...

We study the dynamics of the distribution of overlapping generation economy with finitely lived agents and inter-generational transmission of wealth. Financial markets are incomplete, exposing agents to both labor income and capital income risk. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is...

This paper develops an overlapping generations model of optimal rebalancing where agents differ in age and risk tolerance. Equilibrium rebalancing is driven by a leverage effect that influences levered and unlevered agents in opposite directions, an aggregate risk tolerance effect that depends...

We propose an overlapping generations New Keynesian model in which a permanent (or very persistent) slump is possible without any self-correcting force to full employment. The trigger for the slump is a deleveraging shock, which creates an oversupply of savings. Other forces that work in the...

Previous solution methods could not handle large-scale OLG models such as ours due to the well-known curse of dimensionality. The prior state of the art uses sparse-grid methods to handle 10 to 30 periods depending on the model's realism. Other methods used to solve large-scale, multi- period...

Short-term collateralized debt, such as demand deposits and money market instruments - private money, is efficient if agents are willing to lend without producing costly information about the collateral backing the debt. When the economy relies on such informationally-insensitive debt, firms...

An impulse response is the dynamic average effect of an intervention across horizons. We use the well-known Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to explore a response's heterogeneity over time and over states of the economy. This can be implemented with a simple extension to the usual local...