Abstract The United States relies for its government revenues more on the taxation of capital relative to the taxation of labor than countries in continental Europe do. In this paper we ask what can account for this. Our approach is to look at Markov perfect equilibria of a two-country growth...

This paper argues that an important reason why Russia's performance and China's performance under capitalism have differed dramatically is that different arrangements governing the determination of prices and work practices evolved during the transition process. In Russia, the arrangement, which...

We explore the effects of financial shocks in heterogeneous agent economies with aggregate savings and with frictions in some consumption markets, where demand contributes to productivity. Households of various wealth and earnings levels search for goods at different intensities and pay...

This paper studies the implications of taxing overtime work to reduce the workweek. We study the roles played by team work, commuting costs and idiosyncratic output risk in determining the choice of the workweek. To obtain reliable estimates, we calibrate the model to the substitutability...

José-Víctor Ríos-Rull is Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. His main interests lie in distributional issues in macroeconomics, public economics and demographic economics.

Over time, productivity and education have increased, while hours worked have not. Cross-sectionally, higher-wage individuals have more schooling, more hours worked in the market, fewer hours worked at home, and a lower variance of market hours. Over the life cycle, older individuals have higher...

We study a dynamic version of Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model of the size of government. Taxes are proportional to total income, and they are redistributed as equal lump-sum transfers. Voting takes place periodically over time, and each consumer votes for the tax rate that maximizes his...