This paper first establishes the empirical fact that over the last quarter of the 20th century, the average weekly hours worked increased for workers in the highest wage quintile while it decreased for the ones at the lowest. In 1976, a worker in the lowest quintile worked 2.8 hours more per...

We study the effects of a social security reform in a large overlapping generations model where markets are incomplete and households face uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. We depart from the previous literature by assuming that, because of lack of commitment in the credit market, the...

This paper explores the implications of economic and political inequality for the comovement of government purchases with macroeconomic fluctuations. We set up and compute a heterogeneous-agent neoclassical growth model, where households value government purchases which are financed by income...

Augmenting a standard Bewley model with an entrepreneurial sector and occupational heterogeneity allows us to study important channels through which fiscal policies affect aggregate variables, factor prices, wealth distribution and welfare. To disentangle the forces involved, we consider...

This paper studies the effects of financial policy in a model with heterogeneous agents, incomplete markets and portfolio restrictions. For an economy calibrated to replicate key aspects of the US wealth distribution, we find that the quantitative effects of financial policy are relatively...

This paper studies a complete-market version of the neoclassical growth model, where agents face idiosyncratic shocks to eearnings. We show that if agents possess identical preferences of either the CRRA or the addilog type, then the heterogeneous-agent economy behaves as if there was a...

Although equilibrium allocations in models with incomplete markets are generally not Pareto-efficient, it is often argued that quantitative welfare losses from missing assets are small when time horizons are long and shocks are transitory. In this paper, we use a computational analysis to show...