This paper provides an analytical characterization of Markov perfect equilibria in a model with repeated voting, where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution. A key result is that the future constituency for redistributive policies depends positively on current redistribution,...

We construct a growth model consistent with China's economic transition: high output growth, sustained returns on capital, reallocation within the manufacturing sector, and a large trade surplus. Entrepreneurial firms use more productive technologies, but due to financial imperfections they must...

We develop a model where the allocation of human resources, intergenerational social mobility, and technological growth are jointly determined. High growth endogenously increases the equilibrium return to innate cognitive ability and makes the allocation of individuals depend more on innate...

We develop a model with partial insurance against idiosyncratic wage shocks to quantify risk sharing. Closed-form solutions are obtained for equilibrium allocations and for moments of the joint distribution of consumption, hours, and wages. We prove identification and demonstrate how labor...

We propose a new measure of frictional wage dispersion: the mean-min wage ratio. For a large class of search models, we show that this measure is independent of the wage-offer distribution but depends on statistics of labor-market turnover and on preferences. Under plausible preference...

We study a dynamic version of Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model of the size of government. Taxes are proportional to total income, and they are redistributed as equal lump-sum transfers. Voting takes place periodically over time, and each consumer votes for the tax rate that maximizes his...

The role that investment-specific technological change played in generating postwar U.S. growth is investigated here. The premise is that the introduction of new, more efficient capital goods is an important source of productivity change and an attempt is made to disentangle its effects from the...

We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child labor laws. Workers who compete with children in the labor market support a child labor ban, unless their own working children provide a large fraction of family income. Fertility decisions lock agents into specific political preferences, and...