Most contributions to optimal tax theory have assumed that all prices, including that of leisure, are known with certainty. The purpose of this paper is to analyze optimal taxation when workers have imperfect information about their wages at the time they choose their labor supplies. Both...

We review the literature on uncertainty shocks and business cycle research. First, we motivate the study of uncertainty shocks by documenting the presence of time-variation in the volatility of macroeconomic time series. Second, we enumerate the mechanisms that researchers have postulated to...

This paper examines the risk aspects of an investment-based defined contribution Social Security plan. We focus on the risk after the plan is fully phased in. Individuals deposit a fraction of wages to a Personal Retirement Account (PRA), invest these funds in a 60:40 equity-debt mix, and in a...

We propose a new approach to identify the strength of the precautionary motive and the extent of self-insurance in response to earnings risk based on Euler equation estimates. To address endogeneity problems, we use Norwegian administrative data and instrument consumption and earnings volatility...

The magnitude of and heterogeneity in systematic earnings risk has important implications for various theories in macro, labor, and financial economics. Using administrative data, we document how the aggregate risk exposure of individual earnings to GDP and stock returns varies across gender,...

Recent studies have shown that disaster risk can generate asset return moments similar to those observed in the U.S. data. However, these studies have ignored the cross-country asset pricing implications of the disaster risk model. This paper shows that standard U.S.-based disaster risk model...

To study the welfare implications of rising temperature we propose a temperature-augmented long-run risks model that accounts for the interaction between temperature, economic growth and risk. The model simultaneously matches the projected temperature path, the observed consumption growth...

We study the cross-sectional variation of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global macroeconomic fundamental risk. The risk factor is the cross-country high-minus-low conditional skewness of the unemployment rate gap. It gives a measure of global...

We provide evidence on the relationship between aggregate uncertainty and the macroeconomy. Identifying uncertainty shocks using methods from the news shocks literature, the analysis finds that innovations in realized stock market volatility are robustly followed by contractions, while shocks to...

Uncertainty appears to have both a short-run and a long-run component, which we measure using firm and macro implied volatility data from options of 30 days to 10 years duration. We ask what may be driving uncertainty over these different time horizons, finding that oil price volatility is...