The weight of the average American adult male and female has increased by 16 and 14 pounds respectively and obesity rates have doubled since the early 1960s. Recent studies show these changes in weight can be attributed to the dramatic rise in the consumption of food away from home. We...

We model an environment in which different vintages of capital with their different productivities coexist. A reduction in the cost of investment induces investment in new capital which raises both measured capital and measured productivity simultaneously. We calibrate this model to...

This paper analyzes the general equilibrium effects of capital tax when there is a mandated minimum wage. The analysis is conducted in an inter-temporal search model in which firms post wages as in Burdett and Mortensen (1998). A(binding) minimum wage provides alower support for the distribution...

This paper estimates a general stochastic process for labor income via indirect inference, by jointly using labor income data together with the information embedded in the dynamics of individual consumption. We extend earlier work in several directions. First, we do not restrict income shocks to...

Entrepreneurs often face undiversifiable idiosyncratic risks from their business investments. Motivated by this observation, we extend the standard real options approach to investment to an incomplete markets environment and analyze the joint decisions of business investments, consumption-saving...

This paper investigates the role of discount rate heterogeneity for wealth inequality. The key idea is to infer the distribution of preference parameters from the observed age profile of wealth inequality. The contribution of preference heterogeneity to wealth inequality can then be measured...

Using US quarterly post-war data, this paper documents the existence of two common trends among non-housing non durable and housing consumption, financial and real estate wealth, and labour income (a proxy for human wealth). The first equilibrium relationship reflects the stationarity of the...

Since 1975, the aggregate value of residential land has averaged approximately 90% of GDP and has recently risen to 125% of GDP. In this paper, I use a calibrated general-equilibrium model with idisyncratic labor productivity draws to attempt to measure the extent to which current tax policies,...

After the fall in fertility during the Demographic Transition, many developed countries experienced a baby bust, followed by the Baby Boom and subsequently a return to low fertility. Received wisdom from the Demography literature links these large fluctuations in fertility to the series of...

This paper attempts to provide a coherent general equilibrium explanation for the joint U.S-British evolution during the last thousand years. We typified this period by initial Malthusian stagnation (before 1500); discovery and colonization (between 1500 and 1750); independence of the colony and...