What does your medical expenditure do to your health? Researchers often get significant negative sign on the relative coefficient in the reduced form health production regression. The puzzling result motivates this simple dynamic quantitative general equilibrium model to study the relationships...

Analyzing a variety of cross-national and sub-national data sources, we show that high adult mortality reduces economic growth by shortening time horizons. Higher adult mortality is associated with increased levels of risky behavior, higher fertility and lower investment in physical and human...

This paper incorporates fertility and altruism into the ``value of life'' framework. Two dimensions of fertility and altruism are important in evaluating life expectancy and health related gains. First, child mortality can be very important in determining welfare in a context where individuals...

This paper investigates the impact of borrowing constraints on human capital accumulation and welfare. In a standard overlapping-generations model where parental altruism results in transfers that children allocate to consumption and education, the average level of welfare is higher when...

I analyze the implications of moral hazard in dynamic economy with production. In particular, I add agency frictions to a benchmark stochastic growth model, by assuming that firms observe output but hours worked and productivity are unobservable. I cast the problem as a continuous time principal...

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...

Collective action clauses (CACs) are provisions specifying that a supermajority of bondholders can change the terms of a bond. We study how CACs determine governments' fiscal incentives, sovereign bond prices and default probabilities in environments with and without contingent debt and IMF...

In a frictional labor market, when an employee receives an outside offer, his employer is naturally tempted to compete to retain him. Casual observation in the labor market, however, suggests that this type of ex post competition is rare. As a consequence, employers often let valuable employees...

This paper studies repeated moral hazard in teams. Agents' actions are observable to each other but not to the principal. For any given dynamic contract, agents always select their favorite subgame perfect equilibrium in the corresponding dynamic game. The optimal dynamic contract must take that...