Employing an endogenous growth model with human capital, this paper explores how productivity shocks in the goods and human capital producing sectors contribute to explaining aggregate fluctuations in output, consumption, investment and hours. Given the importance of accounting for both the...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model extended to include heterogeneous expectations, to revisit the evidence that postwar US macroeconomic data can be explained as the outcome of passive monetary policy, indeterminacy, and sunspot-driven fluctuations in the pre-1979 sample, with a switch...

This paper is a survey of the literature on theoretical models of the household, paying particular attention to some of the earlier contributions, and using them to place the current state of the theory in perspective. One of its aims is to suggest that the literature's neglect of Samuelson's...

This paper studies the tax treatment of couples. We develop two different approaches. One is tailored to the analysis of tax systems that stick to the principle that the tax base for couples is the sum of their incomes. One is tailored to the analysis of reforms toward individual taxation. We...

We analyze a generalized neoclassical growth model that combines a normalized CES production function and possible asymmetries of savings out of factor incomes. This generalized model helps to shed new light on a recent debate concerning the impact of factor substitution and income distribution...

This paper explores the effects of high skilled immigration to a host country with unionized low skilled labor and an unemployment insurance scheme. We show that such immigration can create a negative immigration surplus due to adverse effects on low skilled employment, provided that fiscal...

In a neoclassical economy with endogenous capital- and labor-augmenting technical change the steady-state growth rate of output per worker is shown to increase in the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This confirms the assessment of Klump and de La Grandville (2000) that the...

We characterize intertemporal utility functions over heterogeneous goods that feature (i) a constant elasticity of substitution between goods at each point in time and (ii) a constant intertemporal elasticity of substitution for at least one of the goods. We find that a standard (stationary)...

Ignorance enables individuals to act immorally. This is well known in policy circles, where there is keen interest in lowering moral ignorance. In this paper, we study the (in)elasticity of moral ignorance, with respect to monetary incentives, social norms messages and moral context. We propose...

We analyze a generalized neoclassical growth model that combines a normalized CES production function and possible asymmetries of savings out of factor incomes. This generalized model helps to shed new light on a recent debate concerning the impact of factor substitution and income distribution...