The Dynamic Effects of Aggregate Demand and Supply Disturbances in Models with Heterogeneous Inputs

In this paper, we propose a tractable variant of the open economy neoclassical growth model that emphasizes political economy and contracting frictions. The political economy frictions involve disagreement and political turnover, while the contracting friction is a lack of commitment regarding...

Bulow and Rogoff (1989) show that a country that has access to a sufficiently rich asset market cannot commit to repay its debts and therefore should be unable to borrow. This is because for any debt contract, there exists a time at which the country is made better off by defaulting and...

This paper studies the optimal trade-off between commitment and flexibility in an intertemporal consumption/savings choice model. Individuals expect to receive relevant information regarding their own situation and tastes - generating a value for flexibility - but also expect to suffer from...

Credit constraints that link a private agent's debt to market-determined prices embody a credit externality that drives a wedge between competitive and constrained socially optimal equilibria, inducing private agents to ``overborrow." The externality arises because agents fail to internalize the...

Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey we first document that the recent increase in income inequality in the US has not been accompanied by a corresponding rise in consumption inequality. Much of this divergence is due to different trends in within-group inequality, which has increased...

We evaluate the asset pricing implications of a class of models in which risk sharing is imperfect because of the limited enforcement of intertemporal contracts. Lustig (2004) has shown that in such a model the asset pricing kernel can be written as a simple function of the aggregate consumption...

We evaluate the asset pricing implications of a class of models in which risk sharing is imperfect because of the limited enforcement of intertemporal contracts. Lustig (2004) has shown that in such a model the asset pricing kernel can be written as a simple function of the aggregate consumption...

Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey we first document that the recent increase in income inequality in the US has not been accompanied by a corresponding rise in consumption inequality. Much of this divergence is due to different trends in within-group inequality, which has increased...

In the data country portfolios are heavily biased toward domestic assets. Standard one-good international macro models predict that, due to the presence of non-diversifiable labor income risk, country portfolios should be heavily biased toward foreign assets; this discrepancy constitute the...