This paper examines the effects of time-varying volatility on welfare. I construct a tractable endogenous growth model with recursive preferences, stochastic volatility, and capital adjustment costs. The model shows that a rise in volatility can decelerate growth in the absence of any level...

From an economic perspective, imposing a credible one-off net wealth levy in crisis times as a tool to ward off a national emergency appears to be advantageous as, in an ideal world, this would not distort market players’ allocation decisions. However, in practice, charging such a levy may...

This Article examines property law’s effect on economic inequality, particularly centered on Thomas Piketty’s findings in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty finds that when the rate of return on capital is greater than economic growth, capital concentrates among the wealthy,...

This paper combines the Aiyagari/Huggett–type standard incomplete markets model with the Arrow/Romer approach to growth to analyze feedback effects between growth and inequality, both endogenously determined in equilibrium. We derive conditions on existence/ nonexistence of balanced growth...

We present a model in which investors observe the same macroeconomic data but have varying levels of information about the parameters that determine the distribution of the expected returns on investment. During a crisis that increases macroeconomic uncertainty and reduces asset prices, the...

We present a model in which investors observe the same macroeconomic data but have varying levels of information about the parameters that determine the distribution of the expected returns on investment. During a crisis that increases macroeconomic uncertainty and reduces asset prices, the...

This paper examines the relationship between household balance sheets, consumer purchases and expectations. We find few robust empirical relationships between balance sheet measures and spending, but we do find that unemployment expectations are robustly correlated with spending

Lucas (2004) asserts that Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution ... The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current...

This paper combines cross-sectional and longitudinal income data to present the evolution of absolute intergenerational income mobility in ten developed economies in the 20th century. Absolute mobility decreased during the second half of the 20th century in all these countries. Increasing income...

This paper analyzes the problem of a benevolent planner wishing to control a population of heterogeneous agents subject to idiosyncratic shocks. This is equivalent to a deterministic control problem in which the state variable is the cross-sectional distribution. We show how, in continuous time,...