We use regional variation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009-2012) to analyze the effect of government spending on consumer spending. Our consumption data come from household-level retail purchases in the Nielsen scanner data and auto purchases from Equifax credit balances. We...

We develop a quantitative heterogeneous-agents general equilibrium model that reproduces the income inequalities of 32 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Using this model, we compute the optimal income tax rate for each country under the equal-weight...

Standard heterogeneous agent macro models that highlight idiosyncratic productivity shocks do not generate the near zero cross-sectional correlation between hours and wages found in the data. We ask whether matching this moment matters for business cycle properties of these models. To do this we...