The Affordable Care Act introduces or expands taxes on incomes and full-time employment, beginning in 2014. The purpose of this paper is to characterize the new full-time employment taxes from the perspective of a household budget constraint, measure their magnitude, and assess their likely...

Does Social Security redistribute across cohorts? Or is it a program for purchasing the jobs' of the elderly? I formalize both models, showing how they have some predictions in common the most important of which is that generational accounts have the appearance of a pyramid scheme.' I also...

Some of the important implications of the parental investment model of intergenerational mobility have been derived under the assumption that parental income is the main source of heterogeneity. We explicitly model the variability and inheritability of innate' earnings ability and the...

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old age Social Security as a public program? We document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and implicit taxes on labor supply,...

Why are the old politically successful? We build a simple interest group model in which political pressure is time-intensive, showing that in the political competitive equilibrium each group lobbies for government policies that lower their own value of time but that the old do so to a greater...

I show that the indivisible labor' models of Diamond and Mirrlees (1978, 1986), Hansen (1985), Rogerson (1988), Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992), and many others are, when aggregated across persons with the same marginal utility of income, equivalent to the divisible labor model of Lucas and...

Information technology has already transformed some areas of our lives, and has the prospect for transforming other sectors. This paper is about economic behaviors that anticipate technical progress, and how they may describe the housing price and construction boom of 2000-2006 and the bust...

Estimates of the marginal product of capital can help forecast economic growth, test competing business cycle theories, and perform cost-benefit analysis. This paper presents annual and quarterly estimates of the marginal product of capital in the U.S. separately for the residential and...

Factor supply increases (depresses) output for many of the same reasons that the government spending multiplier might be less (greater) than one. Data from three 2008-9 recession episodes - the labor supply shifts associated with the seasonal cycle, the 2009 federal minimum wage hike, and the...