Two key components of the recent U.S. health reform are a new regulation of the individual health insurance market and an increase in income redistribution in the economy. Which component contributes more to the welfare outcome of the reform? We address this question by constructing a general...

This paper makes three contributions: First, I construct annual time series of gross domestic investment and national saving in the U.S. for the 1897–1949 period using historical component series. I compare the qualitative and quantitative properties of the newly constructed series with the...

Investment booms and asset "bubbles" are often the consequence of heavily leveraged borrowing and speculations of persistent growth in asset demand. We show theoretically that dynamic interactions between elastic credit supply (due to leveraged borrowing) and persistent credit demand (due to...

This paper makes three contributions: First, I construct annual time series of gross domestic investment and national saving in the U.S. for the 1897-1949 period using historical component series. I compare the qualitative and quantitative properties of the newly constructed series with the...

I study the asset pricing implications and the efficiency of a tractable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets along the lines of Krebs [Krebs, T., 2003. Human Capital Risk and Economic Growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(2),...

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...

Past government spending in Japan is imposing a significant fiscal burden that is reflected in a net debt to output ratio near 150 percent. In addition, an aging Japanese society implies that public expenditures and transfers payments relative to output are projected to continue to rise until at...

In Italy, as in many other countries, the years immediately after 1929 were characterized by a major slowdown in economic activity. We argue that the depth and duration of the crisis cannot be explained solely by productivity shocks. We present a model in which trade restrictions together with...

Using a dynamic factor model, we uncover four main empirical regularities on international comovements in a long-run panel of real and nominal variables. First, the contribution of world comovements to domestic output growth has decreased over the post-WWII period. The contribution of regional...

This paper proposes a simple model that formalizes a variant of Ohanian's (2001) conjecture explaining the productivity declines observed in the Great Depression. If a large payment shock like an asset-price collapse renders many firms insolvent, other economic agents become exposed to a higher...