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...

We analyze the sustainability of intergenerational transfers in politico-economic equilibrium. We argue that these transfers naturally arise in a Markov perfect equilibrium in the fundamental state variables. In contrast to earlier literature, our explanation does not resort to altruism,...

In this paper we develop a new general methodology for computing the optimal, welfare maximizing social planner's policies for economies with heterogeneous agents in which the stationary distribution of agents is a part of the optimization problem. Previous models analyzing the effects of...

In this paper we argue that it might not be such a bad idea to tax capital income in the long run. We address this question in an environment in which individuals are finitely lived and face uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. In choosing a tax system a benevolent planner trades off...

Where the state evolves according to a discrete-state Markov chain, we sustain Lucas and Stokey's debt structure dynamics by having it emerge sequentially as the unique outcome of a sequence of choices made by two sequences of independent government departments. Each period a tax authority sets...

This paper estimates recent default risk premia for U.S. corporate debt, based on a close relationship between default probabilities, as estimated by the Moody’s KMV EDF measure, and market default swap (CDS) rates. The default-swap data, obtained by CIBC from a large number of dealers...

This paper uses a modified version of the DSGE model estimated in Smets and Wouters (2003) to generate a prior distribution for a vector autoregression, following the approach in Del Negro and Schorfheide (2003). This DSGE-VAR is fitted to Euro area data on GDP, consumption, investment, nominal...

In this paper we investigate the sources of the important shifts in the volatility of U.S. macroeconomic variables in the postwar period. To this end, we propose the estimation of DSGE models allowing for time variation in the volatility of the structural innovations. We apply our estimation...

In the summer of 1997, several East Asian countries experienced a dramatic devaluation of their currencies both in nominal and in real terms, stock prices collapsed and output fell. Later in that year several Latin American countries were also affected, followed by Brazil and Russia in 1998....