Using individual-level data on homeowner debt and defaults from 1997 to 2008, we show that borrowing against the increase in home equity by existing homeowners is responsible for a significant fraction of both the sharp rise in U.S. household leverage from 2002 to 2006 and the increase in...

Robert Solow has criticized our 2006 Journal of Economic Perspectives essay describing "Modern Macroeconomics in Practice." Solow eloquently voices the commonly heard complaint that too much macroeconomic work today starts with a model with a single type of agent. We argue that modern...

The high cost of international economic and financial crises highlights the need for a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of national economic and financial systems. This paper proposes a new comprehensive approach to measure, analyze, and manage macroeconomic risk based on the...

Using a variance decomposition of shocks to GDP, we quantify the role of international factor income, international transfers, and saving in achieving risk sharing during the recent European crisis. We focus on the sub-periods 1990-2007, 2008-2009, and 2010 and consider separately the European...

We study the effects of credit shocks in a model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financing constraints, and a realistic firm size distribution. As entrepreneurial firms can grow only slowly and rely heavily on retained earnings to expand the size of their business in this set-up, we show that,...

According to the textbook Keynesian model, short-run demand for labor is sensitive to the demand for goods. In this view, sellers deviate from setting the marginal product of labor proportional to the real wage, instead enduring or choosing lower price markups when demand for goods is high. We...

How does the output response to a change in government spending vary over the business cycle? What are the welfare effects of spending shocks? This paper studies the state-dependence of the output and welfare effects of shocks to government purchases in a DSGE model with real and nominal...

The wealthy hand-to-mouth are households who hold little or no liquid wealth (cash, checking, and savings accounts), despite owning sizable amounts of illiquid assets (assets that carry a transaction cost, such as housing or retirement accounts). We use survey data on household portfolios for...

This paper analyzes Pareto optimal non-linear taxation of profits and labor income in a private information economy with endogenous firm formation. Individuals differ in both their skill and their cost of setting up a firm, and choose between becoming workers and entrepreneurs. I show that a tax...

We consider optimal redistribution in a model where individuals can self-select into one of several possible sectors based on heterogeneity in a multidimensional skill vector. We first show that when the government does not observe the sectoral choice or underlying skills of its citizens, the...