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...

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...

We investigate optimal consumption, asset accumulation and portfolio decisions in a realistically calibrated life-cycle model with flexible labor supply. Our framework allows for wage rate uncertainly, variable labor supply, social security benefits and portfolio choice over safe bonds and risky...

Governments are known for procrastinating when it comes to resolving painful policy problems. Whatever the political motives for waiting to decide, procrastination distorts economic decisions relative to what would arise with early policy resolution. In so doing, it engenders excess burden. This...

This lecture considers the case for consumer financial regulation in an environment where many households lack the knowledge to manage their financial affairs effectively. The lecture argues that financial ignorance is pervasive and unsurprising given the complexity of modern financial products,...

Will smart machines replace humans like the internal combustion engine replaced horses? If so, can putting people out of work, or at least out of good work, also put the economy out of business? Our model says yes. Under the right conditions, more supply produces, over time, less demand as the...

This paper surveys the field of asset pricing. The emphasis is on the interplay between theory and empirical work, and on the tradeoff between risk and return. Modern research seeks to understand the behavior of the stochastic discount factor (SDF) that prices all assets in the economy. The...

The poor performance of consumption-based asset pricing models relative to traditional portfolio-based asset pricing models is one of the great disappointments of the empirical asset pricing literature. We show that the external habit-formation model economy of Campbell and Cochrane (1999) can...

This paper develops, calibrates, and simulates a dynamic 88-period OLG model to study the intergenerational transmission of U.S. wealth inequality via bequests. The model features marriage, realistic fertility patterns, random death, assortative mating based on skills, heterogeneous skill...

This paper studies three different measures of monthly stock market volatility: the time-series volatility of daily market returns within the month; the cross-sectional volatility or 'dispersion' of daily returns on industry portfolios, relative to the market, within the month; and the...