I analyze how lack of commitment affects the maturity structure of sovereign debt. Ex post, the government trades off the gains from default induced redistribution against the cost of defaulting. Ex ante, the government issues debt of various maturities to raise an exogenous revenue requirement....

In this paper we study the quantitative properties of alternative social security regimes in a large overlapping generations model where households face uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. We study this issue in two model economies. The first is the standard one characterized by exogenous...

In this paper we study optimal taxation in a dynamic game played by a sequence of governments, one for each time period, and a private sector composed of a continuum of households. We focus on the Markov-perfect equilibrium of this game under two assumptions on the extent of government's...

We propose a theory where capital market imperfections are at the origin of cross-country TFP differences. In our theory entrepreneurs have private information about the multifactor productivity of their technology. We study how the contracting environment, as described by the ability to enforce...

In a stochastic economy with overlapping generations, fiscal policy affects the allocation of aggregate risks. The paper shows how to compute the welfare effects of marginal policy changes that shift risk across cohorts, in general and for an application to social security equity investments. I...

We explore a political-economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with...

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...

We study optimal capital taxation under limited commitment. We prove that the optimal tax rate on capital income should be positive in steady state and should be increasing over time provided that full risk-sharing is not feasible. In a limited commitment environment, a one unit increase of...