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 proposes a novel international transmission mechanism based on the assumption of deep habits. The term deep habits stands for a preference specification according to which consumers form habits on a good-by-good basis. Under deep habits, firms face more elastic demand functions in...

This paper analyzes a potential strategy for escaping liquidity traps. The strategy is based on an augmented Taylor-type interest-rate feedback rule and differs from usual specifications in that when inflation falls below a threshold, the central bank temporarily deviates from the traditional...

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...

The great contraction of 2008 pushed the U.S. economy into a protracted liquidity trap (i.e., a long period with zero nominal interest rates and inflationary expectations below target). In addition, the recovery was jobless (i.e., output growth recovered but unemployment lingered). This paper...

This paper studies the relationship between financial structure and the welfare consequences of fixed exchange rate regimes in small open emerging economies with downward nominal wage rigidity. The paper presents two surprising results. First, a pegging economy might be better off with a closed...

More than half of U.S. currency circulates abroad. As a result, much of the seignorage income of the United States is generated outside of its borders. In this paper we characterize the Ramsey-optimal rate of inflation in an economy with a foreign demand for its currency. In the absence of such...

A number of empirical studies document that marginal cost shocks are not fully passed through to prices at the firm level and that prices are substantially less volatile than costs. We show that in the relative-deep-habits model of Ravn, Schmitt-Grohe, and Uribe (2006), firm-specific marginal...