Within the confines of linear tax and complete market, we show that the efficiency force for a negative capital tax may not be strong enough to reverse the politico-economic force for a positive redistributive taxation under temptation and self-control preferences.

The effect of inflation on the capital stock is considered in an overlapping generations framework with a Cash-in-Advance constraint on consumption expenditures. The adjustment mechanism underlying the model is that of a traditional model with the real balance effect on savings.

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...

Using data for U.S. grocery and department store sales from 1919–1939, this paper shows that expected price changes have asymmetric effects on consumption spending. Department store sales (durable consumption) react negatively to expected deflation, but grocery sales (non-durable consumption)...

Credit cards offer a limit, rather than a specific loan size, at a pre-approved interest rate. This paper studies the determination of these credit limits jointly with default in the presence of one-period debt. I adapt the standard incomplete markets macroeconomic model of one-period unsecured...

This paper examines the role of habit formation in a standard state-dependent pricing (SDP) model. Incorporating habit formation helps the SDP model to generate hump-shaped and more persistent output responses under a monetary shock. More importantly, incorporating habit formation causes...

In the United States, the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas has long seen the most intense consumer sales and hence the most active economy. This period varies in length depending on the date of Thanksgiving. Years where it is longer see detectably larger seasonal increases in national...

We examine time-varying correlations among stock market returns, implied volatility and policy uncertainty. Our findings suggest that correlations are indeed time-varying and sensitive to oil demand shocks and US recessions.

In this study, we forecast economic policy uncertainty (EPU) using input on 23 commodity price changes. We reveal the significant predictability of EPU using three forecast combinations. This indicates that commodity price changes can be taken as a leading indicator of EPU.

New estimates of an aggregate long-term production function for the post-war U.S. economy are reported. The results indicate that this long-term aggregate production function exhibits a slight but statistically significant increasing returns to scale. Since virtually all econometric growth...