This paper studies the effects of a flat-tax reform in a dynamic, general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and occupational choice. Each agent has a choice to be a worker or to establish a firm and become an entrepreneur with a limited ability to borrow in financial markets. Because...

The U.S. tax policy on health insurance favors only those offered group insurance through their employers, and is highly regressive since the subsidy takes the form of deductions from the progressive income tax system. The paper investigates alternatives to the current policy. We find that a...

Financing retirement benefits is probably the most significant fiscal challenge that governments in industrial economies will be facing in the next few decades. Social security reform has therefore become an important public policy issue for many countries and various reform proposals have been...

The real business cycle (RBC) model pioneered by Kydland and Prescott (1982) was a fundamental step to understand business cycles. This literature, in general, claims that aggregate technology shocks are the main ingredient to explain these fluctuations. However, in order to match various...

The present project introduces the possibility of default on the trading contracts in an infinite horizon incomplete markets model, relaxing the usual assumption made in the literature with respect to the trading limits, which are chosen to be fixed or independent of the characteristics of the...

This paper uses a temporary equilibrium framework to evaluate the impact of expectations on asset valuation. The model determines asset prices as a function of asset supply as well as the distribution of household endowments and expectations, which is matched to survey data.

This paper explores the baby boom's impact on U.S. house prices and interest rates in the post-war 20th century and beyond. Using a simple Lucas asset pricing model, I quantitatively account for the increase in real house prices, the path of real interest rates, and the timing of low-frequency...