The path breaking work of Card and Krueger (1993), showing higher minimum wage can increase employment turned the age-old conventional wisdom on its head. This paper demonstrates that this apparently paradoxical result is perfectly plausible in a competitive general equilibrium production...

Industrial activity periodically experiences breakthrough innovations in energy efficiency, but the estimated impacts of these innovations on aggregate energy use are highly varied. We develop a general equilibrium model to investigate whether this variation is determined by the structure of the...

This paper derives the incidence of a pollution tax in a stylized general equilibrium framework, building on previous work by Fullerton and Heutel (2007a). Using the CPI as numeraire, we show that tax incidence is a simpler problem than previously thought, and that general insights can be...

This paper studies the impact of optimism on occupational choice using a general equilibrium framework. The model shows that optimism has four main qualitative effects: it leads to a misallocation of talent, drives up input prices, raises the number of entrepreneurs, and makes entrepreneurs...

We develop a stylized general equilibrium model to decompose the rebound effect of energy efficiency improvements into its partial and general equilibrium components. In our theoretical analysis, we identify key drivers of the general equilibrium rebound effect, including a composition channel,...

We study the incidence and the optimal design of nonlinear income taxes in a Mirrleesian economy with a continuum of endogenous wages. We characterize analytically the incidence of any tax reform by showing that one can mathematically formalize this problem as an integral equation. For a CES...

We develop a simple estimation procedure for general equilibrium (GE) comparative static analysis of gravity models. Non-linear solvers of estimated models are replaced by (constrained) regressions. Applied economists can more readily generate results, with more intuition about the working of...

This paper studies general equilibrium when workers in the economy are also consumers of final goods. Once a firm and a worker are matched, there is a standard moral hazard problem. However, the firm's profit depends on the price of the good the worker produces, and the price is determined by...

We show that economies may exhibit a strong endogenous macroeconomic adaptation response to climate change. If climate change induces a structural change to the more productive sector, economies can benefit from climate change though productivities in both sectors are reduced. If climate change...

One of the leading theories of entrepreneurship is that less risk averse individuals become entrepreneurs and more risk averse individuals become their employees. Kihlstrom and Laffont (1979) formalized this insight in an elegant and widely taught general equilibrium model. However, their model...