I use a putty-clay technology to explain several asset market facts. The key mechanism is as follows: a one percent increase in revenues leads to a more-than-one percent increase in profits, since labor costs don’t move one-for-one. This amplification is greater for plants with low...

In this paper, I propose and test a simple technology-based theory of firms’ sensitivities to aggregate shocks. I show that when the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is below unity, low profitability firms are more sensitive to aggregate shocks, i.e. to the business cycle....

To study the long-run effect of dividend taxation on aggregate capital accumulation, we build a dynamic general equilibrium model in which there is a continuum of firms subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks. We find that a dividend tax cut raises aggregate productivity by reducing the...

A capital income tax cut must in general be financed by increasing other taxes, and thus will have redistributive effects. This paper studies analytically the redistribution implied by a capital income tax cut in the Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans neoclassical growth model when agents differ in wealth and...

This paper studies whether the Rietz–Barro “disaster” model, extended for a time-varying probability of disaster, can match the empirical evidence on predictability of stock returns. It is shown that when utility is CRRA, the model cannot replicate this evidence, regardless of parameter...

This paper attempts to reconcile the high apparent aggregate elasticity of labor supply with small micro estimates. We elaborate on Rogerson’s seminal work (1988) and show that his results rely neither on complete markets nor on lotteries, but rather on the indivisibility of labor supply and...