This paper analyzes optimal pre-announced capital and labor income tax reforms under valuable and productive government spending. Our baseline optimal reform reveals that these model ingredients result in a reduction of welfare losses that occur when the reform is announced before its...

Three of the most important recent facts in global macroeconomics — the sustained rise in the US current account deficit, the stubborn decline in long run real rates, and the rise in the share of US assets in global portfolio — appear as anomalies from the perspective of...

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,...

All industrialized countries experienced a transition from high birth rates and stagnant standards of living to low birth rates and sustained growth in per capita income. What contributed to this transformation? Were output and population dynamics driven by common or separate forces? We develop...

This paper explores equilibrium theory of wealth accumulation and wealth inequality when entrepreneurs have collateral constraints and are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks. The model is an extension of Kiyotaki-Moore's setting to incorporate shocks and, at the same time, is a version...

In this paper we study theoretically the dynamics of the distribution of wealth in an Overlapping Generation economy with bequest and various forms of redistributive taxation. We characterize the transitional dynamics of the wealth distribution and as well as the stationary distribution. We show...

In recent years, the learnability of rational expectations equilibria (REE) and determinacy of economic structures have rightfully joined the usual performance criteria among the sought-after goals of policy design. Some contributions to the literature, including Bullard and Mitra (2001) and...

We introduce learning based on genetic algorithms in a principal-agent model of optimal contracting under moral hazard. Applications of this setting abound in finance (credit under moral hazard), public finance (optimal taxation, information-constrained insurance), development (sharecropping),...