In the coming decades, the share of people in working age will fall significantly in most developed countries. According to optimal taxation theory, public debts should be reduced before the baby-boom generation retires. I find that if debts are instead maintained at the current levels, welfare...

Sweden was hit by a severe macroeconomic crisis in the early 1990s. GDP fell for three consecutive years in 1991-1993, unemployment increased by 9 percentage points, banks had to be nationalized, and public budget deficits exceeded 10 percent of GDP. The recovery was however quick. GDP growth...

This paper demonstrates that increased optimism about future productivity can generate an immediate economic expansion in a neoclassical model with vintage capital and variable capacity utilization. Previous research has documented that standard neoclassical models cannot generate a simultaneous...

We use the neoclassical growth framework to model international capital flows in a world with exogenous demographic change. We compare model implications and actual current account data and find that the model explains a small but significant fraction of capital flows between OECD countries, in...

This note examines the accuracy of methods that are commonly used to approximate AR(1)-processes with discrete Markov chains. The quadrature-based method suggested by Tauchen and Hussey (1991) generates excellent approximations with a small number of nodes when the autocorrelation is low or...

This paper demonstrates that increased optimism about future productivity can generate an immediate economic expansion in a neoclassical model with vintage capital and variable capacity utilization. Previous research has documented that standard neoclassical models cannot generate a simultaneous...

The Ramsey optimal taxation theory implies that the tax rate on capital income should be zero in the long run. This result holds even if the social planner only cares about workers that do not hold assets, or if the planner only cares about any other group in the economy. This paper demonstrates...