Dominant paradigms of fertility choice either ignore or assume small, unchanging costof fertility limitation. Inspired by the historical English experience that is contrary to suchassumptions,we modify the Beckerian paradigm to incorporate costly, societal influence oncontraception. In the model...

This paper studies the possibility of endogenous fluctuations caused by activities of financial intermediaries. Risk-averse agents borrow from banks and invest in a risky two-state capital technology. The probability of success with the technology is assumed to be decreasing in the amount of...

Central banks typically supply intraday and overnight reserves at very different costs. The cost of intraday reserves is very close to zero, while the cost of overnight reserves is much higher. In this paper, we discuss the different roles played by reserves intraday and overnight and review...

Momentary equilibria are defined as points that satisfy agents’ optimality conditions and market clearing at any date. However, some dynamic sequences commencing from such points may not be considered valid equilibria because they asymptotically violate some economic restriction of the...

This paper builds a model in which the distribution of income matters for capital formation, and uses it to analyze the effects of a simple policy intended to create a more equal distribution of income on the severity of certain credit market imperfections and, through this channel, capital...

This paper clarifies and extends previous work on the equivalence between monetary regimes and fiscal regimes involving social security systems. We show that monetary regimes of the type we study are equivalent to two alternative types of social security regimes. This result has two important...

We study the properties of two-period monetary cycles in simple pure exchange overlapping generations economies in which the households live for three periods. We demonstrate that these economies can support cycles under a much broader -- and, arguably, more plausible -- range of assumptions...

We consider an otherwise conventional monetary growth model in which spatial separation and limited communication create a transactions role for currency, and stochastic relocation gives rise to financial intermediaries. In this framework we consider how changes in fiscal and monetary policy,...

This note studies a model in which heterogeneous income agents get a utility boost only when their consumption catches up with the Joneses'. The resulting utility function is non-concave. In this setup, participation in a fair consumption lottery has the potential to make some agents ex-ante...

A classic result in dynamic public economics states that there is no welfare rationale for pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pensions in a dynamically-efficient neoclassical economy with exogenous labor supply. Parenthetically, a welfare justification for PAYG pensions exists if the economy is dynamically...