In an economy with identical infinitely-lived households that obtain utility from leisure as well as consumption, Chamley (1986) and Judd (1985) have shown that the optimal tax system to pay for an exogenous stream of government purchases involves a zero tax rate on capital in the long run, with...

I calculate exact expressions for risk premia, term premia, and the premium on levered equity in a framework that includes habit formation, keeping/catching up with the Joneses, and possible departures from rational expectations. Closed-form expressions for the first and second moments of...

I examine optimal taxes in an overlapping generations economy in which each consumer's utility depends on consumption relative to a weighted average of consumption by others (the benchmark level of consumption) as well as on the level of the consumer's own consumption. The socially optimal...

Is the stock market boom a result of the baby boom? This paper develops an overlapping generations model in which a baby boom is modeled as a high realization of a random birth rate, and the price of capital is determined endogenously by a convex cost of adjustment. A baby boom increases...

The Modified Golden Rule, which relates the rate of return on capital and the growth rate of the capital stock along long-run growth paths that maximize the utility of a representative infinitely-lived consumer, is invariant to the introduction of convex capital adjustment costs. Therefore,...

The subjective distribution of growth rates of aggregate consumption is characterized by pessimism if it is first-order stochastically dominated by the objective distribution. Uniform pessimism is a leftward translation of the objective distribution of the logarithm of the growth rate. The...

Jim Poterba finds that consumers do not spend all of their assets during retirement, and he projects that the demand for assets will remain high when the baby boomers retire. Based on his forecast of continued high demand for capital, Poterba rejects the asset market meltdown hypothesis, which...

The equity premium consists of a term premium reflecting the longer maturity of equity relative to short-term bills, and a risk premium reflecting the stochastic nature of equity payoffs and the deterministic nature of payoffs on reckless bills. This paper analyzes term premia and the risk...

This paper derives simple closed-form solutions for expected rates of return on stocks and riskless one-period bills under the assumption that shocks to the growth rates of consumption and dividends are generated by a Markov regime-switching process. These closed-form solutions are used to show...