Data on the life-cycle profiles of inequality in wages, earnings, hours worked, and consumption contain precious information for answering questions about the ability of households to insure labor market risk and about the sources of this risk. This paper demonstrates that the choice of whether...

We analyze positive theories of redistribution, social insurance and public good provision in a dynamic macroeconomic framework. Political outcomes are determined via repeated voting and driven by a conflict of interests between agents. Voters and politicians rationally forecast the impact of...

We examine how technological change affects wage inequality and unemployment in a cali-brated model of matching frictions in the labor market. We distinguish between two polar cases studied in the literature: a "creative destruction" economy, where new machines enter chiefly through new matches...