This paper quantifies the macroeconomic implications of the lack of insurance against idiosyncratic labor market risk. I show that in a model economy calibrated to observed individual level data, households make ample use of work effort as a consumption smoothing mechanism. As a consequence,...

Starr-McCluer (1996) documented an empirical finding showing that US households covered by health insurance saved more than those without coverage, which is inconsistent with the standard consumption-saving theory. This study conducts a structural analysis and suggests that institutional...

We use balance sheet and National Income and Products Accounts (NIPA) data to calibrate factor shares in a model with three factors (land, labor, and capital) and three sectors (business, household, and government). These estimates are used in an overlapping generations model with land to study...

I construct a two-sector growth model to study the effect of the structural transformation between manufacturing and services on the decline in GDP volatility in the US. In the model, a change in the relative size of the two sectors affects the transmission mechanism that relates sectoral TFP...

This paper compares different solution methods for computing the equilibrium of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models with recursive preferences such as those in Epstein and Zin (1989 and 1991) and stochastic volatility. Models with these two features have recently become popular,...

A dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed to examine the impact of mass immigration on capital accumulation in life-cycle economies. The model is calibrated to match Canadian demographic characteristics over 1861-1913. This was a period when Canada experienced a dramatic shift in...

We study the reform of the Spanish public pension system in a multiperiod, general equilibrium, overlapping generations model economy populated by heterogeneous households. Our households differ in their place of birth, in their age, in their education and, endogenously, in their employment...

Treating public policies as computable dynamic general equilibrium model specification errors offers computational and conceptional advantages for comparing models with data. By calculating the set of policies that rationalize observed behavior, the substantive economic question then becomes...

This paper investigates the sustainability of Pareto optimal policies for the replenishment of renewable resources shared by two countries with asymmetrical wealth. It does so within a two-country neo-classical growth model with externality. In absence of commitment, it identifies simple...

Since their opening up to international capital markets, the economies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have experienced large and persistent capital inflows and trade deficits. This paper investigates whether a calibrated two-sector neoclassical growth model can explain the magnitudes and the...