During the last three decades government debt has increased in most developed countries. During the same period we have also observed a significant liberalization of international financial markets. We propose a multi-country model with incomplete markets and show that governments may choose...

This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the importance of entrepreneurship for wealth concentration and mobility using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The data shows a marked concentration of wealth in the hands of entrepreneurs which is not merely a consequence of their...

This article describes the current state of economic theory intended to explain the unequal distribution of wealth among U.S. households. The models reviewed are heterogeneous agent versions of standard neoclassical growth models with uninsurable idiosyncratic shocks to earnings. The models...

This article describes some facts about financial inequality in the United States that a good theory of inequality must be able to explain. These include the facts that labor earnings, income, and wealth are all unequally distributed among U.S. households, but the distributions are significantly...

The volatility of US business cycles has declined during the last two decades. During the same period the financial structure of firms has become more volatile. In this paper we develop a model in which financial factors are central for generating economic fluctuations. Innovations in financial...

This paper examines entrepreneurship in order to analyze, first, the degree to which the opportunity to start or own a business affects the household's saving behavior and the implication of this behavior for the distribution of wealth and, second, the relationship between the extent of...

In this paper we develop a general equilibrium model in which firms finance investment by signing long-term contracts with a financial intermediary. Due to enforceability problems, financial contracts are constrained optimal, that is, they maximize the surplus of the contract subject to...