Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction as the engine of capitalist development is well-known. However, that the destructive part of creative destruction is a social cost and therefore biases our estimate of the impact of the innovation on NNP and on welfare is hardly acknowledged, with the...

This paper quantitatively analyzes how policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic should differ in developing countries. To do so we build an incomplete-markets macroeconomic model with heterogeneous agents and epidemiological dynamics that features several of the key distinctions between...

Business cycles are costlier and stabilization policies could be more beneficial than widely thought. This paper introduces a new test to show that all business cycles are asymmetric and resemble “mini-disasters.” By this we mean that growth is pervasively fat-tailed and non-Gaussian. Using...

The outreach of macroprudential policies is likely limited in practice by imperfect regulation enforcement, whether due to shadow banking, regulatory arbitrage, or other regulation circumvention schemes. We study how such concerns affect the design of optimal regulatory policy in a workhorse...

Central banks increasingly rely on macroprudential measures to manage the financial cycle. However, the effects of such policies on the core objectives of monetary policy to stabilise output and inflation are largely unknown. In this paper, we quantify the effects of changes in maximum...

This paper develops a theoretical foundation for the social cost of carbon (SCC). The model highlights the source of debate over whether countries should use the global or domestic SCC for regulatory impact analysis. I identify conditions under which a country's decision to internalize the...

The UNFCCC process of negotiating multilateral carbon emissions reductions thus far has focused on approximately equiproportional cuts in annual carbon emissions by country along the lines of the Kyoto Protocol agreement. But now, with the objective of involving large developing countries such...

We provide a model for analyzing effects of the tax system and spending programs on the determination of government spending and taxpayer welfare and show that tax system or spending program which is suboptimal from a Ramsey point of view can improve taxpayer welfare because the system creates...

A representative-consumer model with Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences and i.i.d. shocks, including rare disasters, accords with key asset-pricing observations. If the coefficient of relative risk aversion equals 3-4, the model accords with observed equity premia and risk-free real interest rates. If...