"Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we first document that the recent increase in income inequality in the United States 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...

"We show how to decentralize constrained efficient allocations that arise from enforcement constraints between sovereign nations.In a pure exchange economy, these allocations can be decentralized with private agents acting competitively and taking as given government default decisions on foreign...

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...