Abstract We provide a unifying foundation for monetary policy and macroprudential policies in financial markets for economies with nominal rigidities in goods and labor markets and constraints on monetary policy such as the zero lower bound or fixed exchange rates. Macroprudential interventions...

Abstract We analyze the role of the gap r-g between the return of return on capital r and the growth of the economy g rate in a political economy model of bequest taxation. Higher values of r-g lead to higher wealth inequality, and higher and more progressive optimal taxes on bequest. These...

We develop a theory of optimal estate taxation in a model where bequest inequality is driven by differences in parental altruism. We show that a wide range of results are possible, from positive taxes to subsidies, depending on redistributive objectives implicit in the cardinal specification of...

We study the effects of labor mobility within a currency union suffering from nominal rigidities. When the demand shortfall in depressed region is mostly internal, migration may not help regional macroeconomic adjustment. When external demand is also at the root of the problem, migration out of...

We explore steady-state inequality in an intergenerational model with altruistically linked individuals who experience privately observed taste shocks. When the welfare function depends only on the initial generation, efficiency requires immiseration: inequality grows without bound and...

We consider a dynamic Mirrlees economy in a life cycle context and study the optimal insurance arrangement. Individual productivity evolves as a Markov process and is private information. We use a first order approach in discrete and continuous time and obtain novel theoretical and numerical...

A Positive Theory of Capital Taxation

We study cross-country risk sharing as a second-best problem for members of a currency union using an open economy model with nominal rigidities and provide two key results. First, we show that, if financial markets are incomplete, the value of gaining access to any given level of aggregate risk...

We consider a standard New Keynesian model of a small open economy with nominal rigidities and study optimal capital controls. Consistent with the Mundellian view, we find that the exchange rate regime is key. However, in contrast with the Mundellian view, we find that capital controls are...

efficiency gains can be sizable, but we find that most of the improvements can then attributed to the relaxation of borrowing constraints, rather than the introduction of savings distortions.