This essay discusses the policy debate concerning optimal taxation and the distribution of income. It begins with a brief overview of trends in income inequality, the leading hypothesis to explain these trends, and the distribution of the tax burden. It then considers the framework that...

We show that unemployed individuals maintain significant access to credit. Following job loss, the unconstrained borrow, while the constrained default and delever. Both defaulters and borrowers are using credit to smooth consumption. We quantitatively show that long-term credit relationships and...

A long-standing challenge for welfare economics is to develop welfare criteria that can be applied to allocations with different population levels. Such a criterion is essential to resolve the optimal population problem, i.e., the tradeoff between population size and the welfare of each person...

The answer to the question in the title is: A lot. In this essay, I argue that the history of macroeconomics during the 20th century can be divided in three epochs: Pre 1940. A period of exploration, where macroeconomics was not macroeconomics yet, but monetary theory on one side, business cycle...

The intellectual response to the Great Depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Yet both the Austrian and the Keynesian interpretations of the Depression were incomplete. Austrians could explain how a country might get into a...

This paper examines the influence of Irving Fisher's writings on Milton Friedman's work in monetary economics. We focus first on Fisher's influences in monetary theory (the quantity theory of money, the Fisher effect, Gibson's Paradox, the monetary theory of business cycles, and the Phillips...

This paper distinguishes two kinds of Endogenous Business Cycle models; EBC1 models, which display dynamic indeterminacy, and EBC2 models, which display steady-state indeterminacy. Both strands of the literature have their origins in the sunspot literature that developed at the University of...

We propose and evaluate a technique for instrumental variables estimation of linear models with conditional heteroskedasticity. The technique uses approximating parametric models for the projection of right hand side variables onto the instrument space, and for conditional heteroskedasticity and...

This Economica Coase Lecture reviews research that has revolutionized the field of international trade and foreign direct investment. It explains the motivation behind the development of new analytical frameworks, the nature of these frameworks, and the empirical studies that sprouted from them