The US tax system currently provides an incentive for individuals to obtain medical insurance through their employers. This feature introduces a distortion which encourages households consume more medical services than they otherwise would, and likely results in the medical consumption taking up...

This paper examines a model in which growth takes place through investment-specific technological change, which in turn is determined endogenously through research spending. In particular, the role of the degree of substitutability between research spending and new capital construction is...

The effects of distortional fiscal policies are studied within a model in which there is endogenous investment-specific technological change. Labor is used in the production of output and also for research purposes. Labor or capital taxes then distort the trade-off between developing new...

In many locales, the average price of existing home sales is used as an of indicator home prices. This information is then used to establish the value of the property for tax purposes. A simple example is presented here to show that this approach can be very misleading. In this example, the...

In this paper, a modification is made to the endogenous growth model studied by Lucas [1988]. It is shown that if individuals derive utility from their level of human capital, then a tax on the return to physical capital can raise the equilibrium growth rate. Consumption taxation may increase...

Many real business cycle models lack a significant propagation mechanism. Consequently most of the serial correlation in output is inherited from the serial correlation in the exogenous shocks. A simple model is presented to show there need not be any relationship between the serial correlation...

In this paper, we study several general equilibrium models in which the agents in an economy must decide on the appropriate level of immigration into the country. Immigration does not enter directly into the native agents' utility functions, and natives have identical preferences over...