We study a small open economy displaying Pareto-distributed wealth resulting from random death. The government runs a distribution scheme on inheritance. We present the mathematical background that allows to study the dynamics of means. We end up with ordinary differential equations for the mean...

We study a small open economy displaying Pareto-distributed wealth resulting from random death. The government runs a distribution scheme on inheritance. We present the mathematical background that allows to study the dynamics of means. We end up with ordinary differential equations for the mean...

World income grows fast without verifiable climate-change impacts on the economy. The growth spell can end if climate impacts turn real but this can take decades to learn. We develop a tractable stochastic climate-economy model with a hidden-state impact process to evaluate the contributions of...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We exploit a unique natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of...

We use a welfare-based intertemporal stochastic optimization model and historical data to estimate the size of the optimal intergenerational and liquidity funds and the corresponding resource dividend available to the government of the Canadian province Alberta. To first-order of approximation,...

We use the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a rather unique dataset with a long time dimension of panel information on consumption, income and wealth, to structurally estimate a buffer-stock saving model. We exploit the information contained in the joint dynamics of income,...

We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twelve years of population data from Norway’s administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, during our sample period individuals earn markedly different average returns on their...

We use sizeable lottery prizes in Norwegian administrative panel data to characterize households’ marginal propensities to consume (MPCs). Our main contribution is to document how MPCs vary with household characteristics and prize size, and how lottery prizes are spent and saved over time. We...

We incorporate Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses (KUJ) preferences into the Blanchard-Yaari (BY) framework and develop, using an AK technology, a model of balanced growth. In this context we investigate status preference, demographic, and pension policy shocks. We find that a higher degree of KUJ...

This paper considers the quantitative role of growth in the size of the social security program in contributing to the collapse of personal saving in the U.S. over the last few decades. Using a calibrated, general equilibrium life-cycle model this paper shows that social security may not be to...