We adjust current account surpluses and deficits of 57 countries in the period 2005–2009 for differences in the age structure of their populations and find that these differences can account for a significant part of the variation in the data. Among the large countries we find that the...

We develop and characterize analytically an investment model in discrete time with a fixed adjustment cost not proportional to existing capital and complete irreversibility that reproduces the lumpiness of investment at the micro-level. In agreement with the empirical evidence, as a firm size...

We find that lottery tax windfalls finance higher state-government expenditures on supplemental security income that increase consumption, but only during bust periods. Wealth transfers from lottery winners to low income households enable fiscal policy to stabilize consumption during bust periods.

Consumption falls counter-factually on impact for investment-specific technology shocks, which, recent literature suggests, are important drivers of business cycles. Introducing financial frictions and variable capacity utilization to the standard New-Keynesian setup can overturn this...

In a search and matching model with right-to-manage bargaining, matched workers and firms bargain over wages, given the firm’s demand schedule for hours per worker. Wages and hours per worker are determined as if they are determined in a competitive labor market with a distortion to wage...

This paper presents a simple formula relating the efficiency of the level of unemployment benefits to the cost of saving in an infinite-horizon economy in which households can borrow up to their natural borrowing limit. I extend Baily’s (1978) result showing that the benefits of unemployment...

Financing government spending through lump sum taxes does not distort capital when markets are complete but tends to increase precautionary savings under market incompleteness. Using flat consumption taxes instead leaves precautionary savings unaffected, provided certain conditions on utility...

A stylized fact of European unemployment dynamics is one of extreme persistence and possible unit root behavior. This has led to a major reconsideration of the natural rate paradigm. We apply the Kalman filter to estimate the natural rate of unemployment for Germany and France. When the moving...

We study the neoclassical growth model with non-constant discounting. We do not assume specific functional forms for discounting and demonstrate that the competitive economy always performs better than the planning economy.

We show that to account for the cross-sectional divergence in debt-to-income ratios in US data a DSGE model must assume a tax reallocation across the top- and bottom-income quantile of the population, rather than differential productivity growth, and low cost of access to financial intermediation.