We analyze a new class of equilibria that emerges when a central bank conducts monetary policy by setting an interest rate (as an arbitrary function of its available information) and letting the private sector set the quantity traded. These equilibria involve a run on the central bank's interest...

This paper considers an optimal taxation environment where household income is private information, and the government randomly audits and punishes households found to be underreporting. We prove that the optimal mechanism derived using standard mechanism design techniques has a bad equilibrium...

This paper presents a full characterization of the equilibrium value set of a Ramsey tax model. More generally, it develops a dynamic programming method for a class of policy games between the government and a continuum of households. By selectively incorporating Euler conditions into a...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of how the U.S. Social Security and Medicare system affects the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets. The authors estimate a dynamic programming model of the joint labor supply and Social Security acceptance decision. The...

This paper considers an optimal taxation environment where household income is private information, and the government randomly audits and punishes households found to be underreporting. We prove that the optimal mechanism derived using standard mechanism design techniques has a bad equilibrium...

This paper argues that both unequal opportunity and social mobility are necessary implications of an efficient societal arrangement when incentives must be provided. Copyright 2006, Wiley-Blackwell.