This paper uses a dynamic political economy model to evaluate whether the observed rise in wage inequality and decrease in median to mean wages can explain some portion of the relative increase in transfers to low earnings quintiles and relative increase in effective tax rates for high earnings...

This paper develops a political economy model to evaluate how inequality affects policies via the political process. The model is an extension of Krusell and Rios-Rull (1999) to incorporate uninsured idiosyncratic risk to income. Using this framework, we evaluate the response of social insurance...

We develop a model of banking industry dynamics to study the quantitative impact of capital requirements on bank risk taking, commercial bank failure, and market structure. We propose a market structure where big, dominant banks interact with small, competitive fringe banks. Banks accumulate...

and productivity shocks similar to the assumptions in Chatterjee, Corbae, Nakajima, and Rios-Rull (2007, Econometrica).

business cycles, and borrower default frequencies. The model is parameterized to match a set of key aggregate and cross-sectional statistics for the U.S. banking industry. As in the data, the model generates countercyclical interest rates on loans, bank failure rates, borrower default...

The impact of capital market imperfections and costs of creating and operating formal sector firms on total factor productivity is studied. We propose a firm dynamics model with endogenous formal and informal sectors where firms face a technology adoption opportunity. The model predicts that...

This paper studies the link between credit conditions and formalization in Brazil, as both credit and the rate of formalization have notably increased in the last decade. A firm dynamics model with endogenous formal and informal sectors is developed to quanti- tatively evaluate how much of the...

How much of the recent rise in foreclosures can be explained by the large number of high-leverage mortgage contracts originated during the housing boom? We present a model where heterogeneous households select from a set of mortgage contracts and choose whether to default on their payments given...

We analyze a financial collapse, such as the one which occurred during the Great Depression, from the perspective of a monetary model with multiple equilibria. The economy we consider contains financial fragility due to increasing returns to scale in the intermediation process. Intermediaries...