Standard macroeconomic models possess the undesirable feature that people stop working in the long run. Assuming standard parameters, the neoclassical model predicts that 2% of annual productivity growth leads to a 99% decline in the labor supply after 624 years. Yet, this contradicts the fact...

In a Barro-type economy with exogenous consumption aspirations, raising income taxes favors growth even in the presence of lump-sum taxes. Such a policy is compatible with the behavior of private consumption, income taxes and growth rates observed in actual economies.

This paper characterizes a class of regularly varying production functions with an asymptotic elasticity of substitution equal to one. In particular, it is shown that these functions asymptotically approximate the Cobb–Douglas form. The results generalize and unify existing results in the...

Branch (2014) shows that the asymmetric preference of professional forecasters enhances the fit of the original Taylor rule with respect to recent US monetary policy. This paper investigates the stability of the Taylor rule with asymmetric preference under adaptive learning. We find that when...

While most of the literature explaining the change in consumption composition has focused on the role of relative prices and non-homothetic preferences, this paper examines the importance of preference shifts. I introduce dynamics in preferences and find that they play a relevant role and that...

With moral hazard and anonymous asset trade, first-order conditions need not characterize effort and portfolio choices. The standard procedure for establishing validity of the first-order approach in economies with one hidden asset is not fruitful when multiple assets are hidden.

This paper identifies a new sufficient condition for a prudent agent to have positive precautionary saving in the presence of labor income and interest rate risks of any size. We also provide three economic interpretations for this condition focusing respectively on the marginal effect of saving...

Analytical expectational stability results are obtained for both Euler-equation and infinite-horizon adaptive learning in a simple stochastic growth model. The rational expectations equilibrium is stable under both types of learning, though there are important differences in the learning dynamics.

This paper investigates nonlinear effects of government debt on private consumption. The estimated consumption function shows smooth regime switching depending on the debt-to-GDP ratio, and a higher level of government debt crowds out private consumption to a greater extent.

This paper derives closed-form and numerical solutions for relative risk aversion in a standard consumption-based model enriched with housing. The presence of housing enables the household to hedge against unexpected shocks and may decrease relative risk aversion. In addition, housing may...