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, we show that, by reducing...

When young individuals face binding debt constraints, their human capital investments will be insufficiently financed by private creditors. If generations overlap, then a well-designed fiscal policy may be able to improve human capital investments by replacing missing capital markets with an...

In this paper I study the nature of optimal factor income taxation in a neoclassical growth model where search frictions on the labor marker generate unemployment. I show that the introduction of search frictions changes the Chamley-Judd result of zero capital taxation as follows: if the...

This paper analyzes the effects of intergenerational conflict on capital and labor income tax rates, transfers, and government spending in a model of multidimensional policy choice. The different nature of tax liabilities for the young and the old can explain why the old receive large gross...