The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) significantly altered how business income is taxed in the US. This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the distributional and macroeconomic effects of the TCJA, both in the short run and in the long run, using a life-cycle model with occupational choice...

In this paper, I extend the Barro-Becker model of endogenous fertility to incorporate specific fiscal policies and use it to study the effects of the fiscal policy changes following WWII on fertility in the United States. The US government went through large changes in fiscal policy after the...

This paper develops a monetary model with taxes to account for the time-varying effects of energy shocks on output and hours worked in post-World War II U.S. data. In our model, the real effects of an energy shock are amplified when the monetary authority responds to that shock by changing its...

This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and their subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between groups that disagree on targeted public spending (e.g., pork) results in governments being endogenously short-sighted:...

We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how Federal Income tax liabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts on the distributions of average taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxes paid and income, and...

We compute the optimal non-linear tax policy for a dynastic economy with uninsurable risk, where generations are linked by dynastic wealth accumulation and correlated incomes. Unlike earlier studies, we take full account of the welfare distribution along the transition to the new steady state...

We consider the extent to which cross-country differences in the intergenerational persistence of income can be explained by differences in government spending on early childhood education. We build a life-cycle model where human capital is accumulated in early, middle and late childhood. Both...

In this paper, we use a general equilibrium model of endogenous growth in which there is heterogeneity in skill, income, and tax rates to evaluate the effect of progressivity of taxes on growth and welfare. In this framework, changes in the progressivity of tax rates can have positive growth...

Most economic models do not suggest an optimal fiscal policy in which the government's budget is balanced each period. Conventional wisdom suggests that the government run surpluses and deficits to smooth taxes. In this paper, I use an approach which brings together real business cycle theory...

We determine the second best rule for the inflation tax in monetary general equilibrium models where money is dominated in rate of return. The results in the literature are ambiguous and inconsistent across different monetary environments. We derive and compare the optimal inflation tax...