Evidence that real exchange rate dynamics can be described using models which exhibit nonlinear mean reversion has been mounting over the past decade. This article attempts to better understand the shape of real exchange rate nonlinearity through the use of the Smooth Transition Autoregressive...

In 2008, the Utah Retirement System experienced a negative return of almost 25 percent on its portfolio. This resulted in an underfunding of the pension system. In 2010 the Utah legislature reformed state pension participation, placing all new employees hired after mid-2011 in a new hybrid...

Fiscal sustainability is one of the most pressing policy issues of our time. Yet it remains difficult to quantify. Official debt is plagued with a number of measurement difficulties since its measurement reflects the choice of words, not policies. And forming the fiscal gap-the imbalance in the...

This paper uses a representative agent model to infer the welfare of heterogeneous agents. It does so by partitioning the household into subunits and allocating consumption to each subunit proportionally to the income the subunit generates through wages and capital returns. We show that for a...

There is considerable evidence that real wages have become more procyclical over time in the U.S. A novel explanation for this phenomenon has been recently offered by Huang, Liu, and Phaneuf (2004), HLP. They develop a model to show that, as the input-output structure of an economy becomes more...

We characterize and demonstrate a solution method for an optimal commodity (sales) tax problem consisting of multiple goods, heterogeneous agents, and a nonconvex policy maker optimization problem. Our approach allows for more dimensions of heterogeneity than has been previously possible,...

This paper proposes a method for integrating individual effective tax rates and marginal tax rates computed from a microsimulation (partial equilibrium) model of tax policy with a dynamic general equilibrium (DGE) model of tax policy that can provide macroeconomic analysis or dynamic scores of...

The overlapping generations (OLG) model is an important framework for analyzing any type of question in which age cohorts are affected differently by exogenous shocks. However, as the dimensions and degree of heterogeneity in these models increase, the computational burden imposed by rational...

This paper considers a model which incorporates Schumpeterian type growth into an otherwise standard RBC model similar to the one in Phillips & Wrase (2006). We consider a model with three sources of shocks. The first is a standard productivity shock. The second is a set of Schumpeterian...