This paper investigates the welfare costs of business cycles in a heterogeneous agent, overlapping generations economy which is distinguished by idiosyncratic labor market risk. Aggregate variation arises both in terms of aggregate productivity shocks and countercyclical variation in the...

Firm-level investment paths are commonly characterised by periods of low or zero investment punctuated by large investment ‘spikes’. We document that such spikes are important for understanding firm and aggregate level investment in the UK. We show that annual variation in aggregate...

We estimate a model that allows for dynamic and interdependent responses of morbidity in different local areas to economic conditions at the local and national level, with statistical selection of optimal local area. We apply this approach to quarterly British data on chronic health conditions...

Alcohol consumption is associated with costs to society due to its impact on crime and health. Tax can lead consumers to internalise these externalities. We study optimal corrective taxation in the alcohol market. We allow for the fact that the externality generating commodity (ethanol) is...

We study optimal corrective taxation in the alcohol market. Consumption generates negative externalities that are non-linear in the total amount of alcohol consumed. If tastes for products are heterogeneous and correlated with marginal externalities, then varying tax rates on different products...

This paper develops a dynamic macroeconomic model with heterogeneous financial intermediaries and endogenous entry. It features time-varying endogenous macroeconomic risk that arises from the risk-shifting behaviour of the cross-section of financial intermediaries. We show that when interest...

This paper develops an overlapping generations model of optimal rebalancing where agents differ in age and risk tolerance. Equilibrium rebalancing is driven by a leverage effect that influences levered and unlevered agents in opposite directions, an aggregate risk tolerance effect that depends...

We introduce a solution technique for the study of discrete time stochastic models populated by long-lived agents. We introduce aggregate uncertainty and complete markets into a 'perpetual-youth' model of a kind first studied by Olivier Blanchard and we show that the pure-trade version of the...

We implement a new approach for the identification of news shocks about future technology. In a VAR featuring a measure of aggregate technology and several forward-looking variables, we identify the news shock as the shock orthogonal to technology innovations that best explains future variation...

In this paper, we measure the potential welfare gains from counter-cyclical policy in an economy with incomplete markets. In the course of conducting this measurement, we focus on two questions as central to the determination of those potential gains: (1) what is the likely effect of...