This paper proposes a Social Security reform for the United States that gradually, but ultimately fully, privatizes the system. This proposal follows the “no-harm, no-foul” principle in that it preserves the benefits of older generations and yet promises the same or higher retirement...

In this paper, we perform computational counterfactual experiments to examine the quantitative impact of marginal tax rates on the distribution of income. Our methodology builds on previous simulation models developed by Auerbach and Kotlikoff and Fullerton and Rogers, and uses an algorithm that...

Observing the current wage at a job may not fully reflect the value of that job. For example, a job with a low starting wage may be preferred to a high starting wage job if the growth rate of wages in the former exceeds the latter. In fact, differences in wage growth can potentially explain why...

We study general equilibrium with nonconvexities. In these economies there exist sunspot equilibria without the usual assumptions needed in convex economies, and they have good welfare properties. Moreover, in these equilibria, agents act as if they have quasi-linear utility. Hence wealth...

Calibration has become a standard tool of macroeconomics. This paper extends and refines the calibration methodology along several important dimensions. First, accounting for home production is important both in measuring calibration targets and in organizing the data in a model-consistent...

Real business cycle models have difficulty replicating the volatility of Samp;P 500 returns. This fact should not be surprising since real business cycle theory suggests that the return to capital should be measured by the return to aggregate market capital, not stock market returns. We...

This paper extends the Pissarides (2000) model of the labor market to include crime and punishment 'a la Becker (1968). All workers, irrespective of their labor force status can commit crimes and the employment contract is determined optimally. The model is used to study, analytically and...

The paper documents how cyclical fluctuations in market work vary over the life cycle and then assesses the predictions of a life-cycle version of the growth model for those observations. The analysis yields a simple but striking finding. The main discrepancy between the model and that data lies...