Following the introduction of the one-child policy in China, the capital-labor (K/L) ratio of China increased relative to that of India, and, simultaneously, FDI inflows relative to GDP for China versus India declined. These observations are explained in the context of a simple neoclassical OLG...

Lucas (1990) argues that the neoclassical adjustment process fails to explain the relative paucity of FDI inflows from rich to poor countries. In this paper we consider a natural experiment: using China as the treated country and India as the control, we show that the dynamics of the relative...

Following the introduction of the one-child policy in China, the capital-labor (K/L) ratio of China increased relative to that of India, and, simultaneously, FDI inflows relative to GDP for China versus India declined. These observations are explained in the context of a simple neoclassical OLG...

Marginal income taxes may have an insurance effect by decreasing the effective fluctuations of after-tax individual income. By compressing the idiosyncratic component o personal income fluctuations, higher marginal taxes should be negatively correlated with the dispersion of consumption across...

Modern macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind economic actions by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. This analytical approach requires that incentives of the poor and the rich are strictly aligned. In empirical analysis a...

This paper proposes a new approach for modeling investor fear after rare disasters. The key element is to take into account that investors’ information about fundamentals driving rare downward jumps in the dividend process is not perfect. Bayesian learning implies that beliefs about the...

Based on OECD evidence, equity/housing-price busts and credit crunches are followed by substantial increases in public consumption. These increases in unproductive public spending lead to increases in distortionary marginal taxes, a policy in sharp contrast with presumably optimal Keynesian...

Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

In fifteen European countries, China, and the US, stocks and business equity as a share of total household assets are represented by an increasing and convex function of income/wealth. A parsimonious model fitted to the data shows why background labor-income risk can explain much of this...

Most simulated micro-founded macro models use solely consumer-demand aggregates in order to estimate deep economy-wide preference parameters, which are useful for policy evaluation. The underlying demand-aggregation properties that this approach requires, should be easy to empirically disprove:...