I develop a highly tractable general equilibrium model in which heterogeneous producers face collateral constraints, and study the effect of financial frictions on capital misallocation and aggregate productivity. My economy is isomorphic to a Solow model but with time-varying TFP. I argue that...

Saving and growth are strongly positively correlated across countries. Recent empirical evidence suggests that this correlation holds largely because high growth leads to high saving, not the other way around. This evidence is difficult to reconcile with standard growth models, since...

This paper examines the role for tax policies in productivity-shock driven economies with catching-up-with-the-Joneses utility functions. The optimal tax policy is shown to affect the economy countercyclically via procyclical taxes, i.e., "cooling down" the economy with higher taxes when it is...

This paper studies decisionmaking with rules of thumb in the context of dynamic decision problems and compares it to dynamic programming. A rule is a fixed mapping from a subset of states into actions. Rules are compared by averaging over past experiences. This can lead to favoring rules which...

We investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in Italy by exploiting pension eligibility information to correct for endogenous retirement. We take a regression discontinuity approach and assume that spending would be smooth around pension eligibility if individuals did not...

This paper presents a model of business cycles driven by shocks to consumer expectations regarding aggregate productivity. Agents are hit by heterogeneous productivity shocks, they observe their own productivity and a noisy public signal regarding aggregate productivity. The public signal gives...

We assess the empirical importance of changes in income and relative prices for structural transformation in the postwar United States. We explain two natural approaches to the data: sectors may be categories of final expenditure or value added; e.g., the service sector may be the final expenditure...

We estimate how durable expenditures respond to government spending shocks at different points in the business cycle using a nonlinear VAR approach that allows for the durable multiplier to vary smoothly with the state of the economy. We find strong evidence that the aggregate durable spending...