This paper studies fertility decisions in an Aiyagari-Huggett economy extended to include endogenous fertility. The challenge is to explain both why fertility decreases with income, and why there is intergenerational persistence of inequality. The model features non-isoelastic altruism,...

Life expectancy around the world has increased substantially since 1970. In contrast, consumption per capita has fallen in some countries, remained stagnant, or sharply increased in others. What are the welfare gains of the systematic increase in life expectancy around the world? How does a...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of collateral constraints as a transmission mechanism of monetary shocks. We do this by introducing money in the heterogeneous-agent real economy of Kiyotaki and Moore (1997). Money enters in a cash-in-advance constraint and is injected via...

Theoretical studies have shown that under unorthodox assumptions on preferences and production technologies, collateral constraints can act as a powerful amplification and propagation mechanism of exogenous shocks. We investigate whether or not this result hold under more standard assumptions....

Theoretical studies have shown that under unorthodox assumptions on preference and production technologies, collateral constraints can act as a powerful amplification and propagation mechanism of exogenous shocks. We investigate whether or not this result holds under more standard assumptions....

This paper builds a welfare measure encompassing household disposable income, unemployment and longevity, while using two different sets of “shadow prices” for non-income variables. The valuations of vital and unemployment risks estimated from life satisfaction data (“subjective shadow...