We explore the optimal progressivity of the income tax system in an incomplete-markets model. Agents value private and public consumption and leisure, and are heterogeneous with respect to innate ability, idiosyncratic shock histories, and preferences. This heterogeneity generates a potential...

We document a strong negative relation in the United States between wealth and aggregate volatility. For example the 1970s and the late 2000s were periods of low asset values and high volatility. The early 1960s and the Great Moderation of the 1980s and 1990s were periods of high asset values...

We conduct a welfare analysis of redistributive labor taxation in a tractable heterogeneous-agents economy. We highlight four key considerations that determine the optimal overall progressivity of the tax schedule: (i) the preference weight on public consumption goods, (ii) the variance of...

We first document a strong negative correlation between the level of household net worth, and aggregate business cycle volatility over the past 50 years in the United States. The early 1960s and the Great Moderation of the 1980s and 1990s were periods of high asset values and low volatility. The...

This paper offers a quantitative exploration of optimal income tax design in the Mirrlees tradition, and asks how nearly simple parametric tax functions can decentralize constrained efficient allocations. The environment features both observable and unobservable components of idiosyncratic labor...

uninsurable wage risk, insurable wage risk, and measurement error.

In this paper, we construct the first constant-quality aggregate price index for the stock of residential land in the United States. In the process, we uncover four main results: (a) since 1970, residential land prices have risen nearly twice as fast, but also have been twice as volatile as...

This paper builds a simple theoretical model designed to study dollarization. Each period, a benevolent government decides whether or not to dollarize, how much to borrow or lend on an international bond market, and, if dollarization has not occurred, the devaluation rate. In equilibrium,...

In the data country portfolios are heavily biased toward domestic assets. Standard one-good international macro models predict that, due to the presence of non-diversifiable labor income risk, country portfolios should be heavily biased toward foreign assets; this discrepancy constitute the...