This paper highlights the identification problem of the reduced-form approach in quantifying the degree of consumption insurance as in Blundell et al. (2008, BPP thereafter). I argue that the reduced-form estimates are difficult to interpret in terms of the degree of consumption insurance. I...

How does the persistence of earnings change over the life cycle? Do workers at different ages face the same variance of idiosyncratic earnings shocks? This paper proposes a novel specification for residual earnings that allows for an age profile in the persistence and variance of labor income...

This paper examines the importance of ex-ante heterogeneity for understanding the relationship between wealth and labor supply when markets are incomplete. An infinite horizon model is estimated where labor supply is indivisible and households are ex-ante heterogeneous in their labor disutility...

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on "Cross Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists''. The issue documents, for nine countries, the level and the evolution, over time and over the life cycle, of several dimensions of economic inequality,...

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,...

In this paper I present an explanation to the fact that in the data wealth is substantially more concentrated than income. Starting from the observation that the composition of households' portfolios changes towards a larger share of high-yield assets as the level of net worth increases, I first...

This paper examines entrepreneurship in order to analyze, first, the degree to which the opportunity to start or own a business affects the household's saving behavior and the implication of this behavior for the distribution of wealth and, second, the relationship between the extent of...

In a repeated game with imperfect public information, the set of equilibria depends on the way that the distribution of public signals varies with the players' actions. Recent research has focused on the case of "frequent monitoring," where the time interval between periods becomes small. Here...

This paper analyzes the dynamic politico-economic equilibrium of a model where repeated voting on social security and the evolution of household characteristics in general equilibrium are mutually affected over time. In particular, we incorporate within-cohort heterogeneity in a two-period...

We use all available waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances to document the evolution of the wealth distribution in the US since the 1980s. Relying on the shape of this distribution we then estimate a life-cycle incomplete markets model. We find that considering a wide range of net worth...