The economics workings of the corporate income tax remain controversial. Harberger's seminal 1962 article viewed the tax as raising the cost of capital used to produce corporate goods. But corporate goods can be and generally are made by non-corporate firms, suggesting that the corporate tax...

This paper surveys major issues in the theory of tax incidence. These include the incidence of taxes in dynamic as well as static economies and open as well as closed economies. The survey does not represent a comprehensive review of the literature, rather it is offered to the reader as a...

This paper studies the provision of deposit insurance without commitment in an economy with heterogenous households. When households are identical, deposit insurance will be provided ex post to reap insurance gains. But the ex post provision of deposit insurance redistributes consumption when...

The literature on inventory holdings stresses their role in smoothing production when costs are convex. Existing empirical evidence suggests that output is more variable than consumption so that production smoothing is not apparently present. One way of explaining this finding is to allow for...

Are smarter machines our children's friends? Or can they bring about a transfer from our relatively unskilled children to ourselves that leaves our children and, indeed, all our descendants - worse off? This, indeed, is the dire message of the model presented here in which smart machines...

This paper studies debt fragility and the sharing of the resulting strategic uncertainty through ex post bailouts. Default arises in equilibrium because of both fundamental shocks and beliefs. The probability of default depends on borrowing rates and, in equilibrium, on the beliefs of lenders...

This paper studies the interaction between capital reallocation and business cycles. Capital reallocation is pro-cyclical and leads to variations in measured aggregate productivity. Using a simulated method of moments approach, different sources of aggregate fluctuations are studied to assess...

This paper studies household financial choices: why are these decisions dependent on the education level of the household? A life cycle model is constructed to understand a rich set of facts about decisions of households with different levels of education attainment regarding stock market...

This paper studies the dynamic optimization problem of a household when portfolio adjustment is costly. The analysis is motivated by the observation that on an annual basis, less than 71% of stockholders typically adjust their portfolio of common stocks. We use this, and related observations, to...

This paper studies fiscal spillovers in a monetary union. The focus of the analysis is on the interaction between the fiscal policy of member countries (regions) and the central monetary authority. When capital markets are integrated, the fiscal policy of one country will influence equilibrium...