We study the optimal Mirrlees taxation problem in a dynamic economy with idiosyncratic (productivity or preference) shocks. In contrast to the standard approach, which implicitly assumes that the mechanism is operated by a benevolent planner with full commitment power, we assume that any...

The path of economic development for rich industrialized countries is typically to transit from farming to manufacturing to services. To do so requires corresponding productivity gains to pull the economy from one sector to the next one. For example, the US and Japan developed their...

Although it is well known that aggregate variables have slow-moving stochastic components, research on macroeconomic fluctuations has focused primarily on high-frequency movements of the data. I document some interesting lower-frequency facts in U.S. postwar data and investigate whether dynamic...

In 1910 the average American city was a small and densely populated place where the dominant form of intracity transportation was the electric streetcar. Despite the release of the Model T in 1908, less than one percent of Americans owned a car. In contrast, by 1970, almost every family in the...

This paper provides a unified theory of the economic and demographic transition. The main mechanism is based on optimal decisions about fertility and time investments in heterogeneous types of human capital. These decisions depend on different dimensions of health, which themselves are...

We show that price stickiness is predicted by the theory of second best, applied to a random- matching model of money. The economy is hit with iid, aggregate, preference shocks, and allocations are allowed to be history dependent. Due to individual anonymity and lack of commitment, implementable...

Microeconomic lumpiness matters for macroeconomics. According to our DSGE model, it is responsible for 92 percent of the smoothing in the investment response to aggregate shocks, and it introduces important nonlinearities and history dependance in business cycles and policy sensitivity. General...