This paper shows that dynamic inefficiency can occur in dynamic general equilibrium models with fully optimizing, infinitely-lived households even in a situation with underinvestment. We identify necessary conditions for such a possibility and illustrate it in a standard R&D-based growth model....

What shapes the optimal degree of progressivity of the tax and transfer system? On the one hand, a progressive tax system can counteract inequality in initial conditions and substitute for imperfect private insurance against idiosyncratic earnings risk. At the same time, progressivity reduces...

The Survey of Professional Forecasters is the oldest quarterly survey of macroeconomic forecasts in the United States. The survey began in 1968 and was conducted by the American Statistical Association and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia took...

In a simplified model GDP growth depends on the demand effect of private investment growth and on the growth of the private savings ratio. In a generalized model private investment (IP) has to be supplemented by the trade balance (E) and the budget deficit (D), their sum being termed NPCE...

Why do some people become entrepreneurs (and others don't)? Why are firms so heterogeneous, and many firms so small? To start, the paper briefly documents evidence from the empirical literature that the relationship between entrepreneurship and education is U-shaped, that many entrepreneurs...

This paper provides a cross-country comparison of life-cycle and business-cycle fluctuations in the dispersion of household-level wage innovations. We draw our inference from household panel data sets for the US, the UK, and Germany. First, we find that household characteristics explain about...

We quantify the role of contractionary monetary shocks and wage rigidities in the U.S. Great Contraction. While the average economy-wide real wage varied little over 1929-33, real wages rose significantly in some industries. We calibrate a two-sector model with intermediates to the 1929 U.S....

While the immigration policy in the United States is mainly oriented to family reunification, in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. it is a points-based immigration system which main objective is to attract high skilled immigrants. This paper compares both immigration policies through the...

This paper introduces inventories in an otherwise standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Model (DSGE) of the business cycle. Firms accumulate inventories to facilitate sales, but face a cost of doing so in terms of costly storage of intermediate goods. The paper's main contribution is...

We review evidence on the Great Moderation together with evidence about volatility trends at the micro level to develop a potential explanation for the decline in aggregate volatility since the 1980s and its consequences. The key elements are declines in firm-level volatility and aggregate...