This paper points out that negative comovements between macroeconomic aggregates are commonly observed in US data and that this is not explained by conventional business cycle models which emphasize positive comovements only. We discuss how these facts can be readily explained in simple...

This paper investigates the impact of demographic shocks on optimal decisions about saving, life insurance, and, most centrally, asset allocation. We analyze these choices within the framework of a life-cycle model that features exogenous changes in family composition, heterogeneity in lifetime...

Previous studies find a strong and positive empirical connection between health status and the share of risky assets held in household portfolios. But is this relationship truly causal, in the sense that households respond to changes in health by altering their portfolio allocation, or does it...

We examine the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We find that the median older U.S. household is reasonably well situated, with a ratio of comprehensive net wealth to present value poverty- line wealth of about...

Defined benefit (DB) pension freezes in large healthy firms such as Verizon and IBM, as well as terminations of plans in the struggling steel and airline industries, highlight the fact that these traditional pensions cannot be viewed as risk-free promises from the employeeÂ’s perspective....

This paper provides a new explanation for "tax holidays," as well as their subsequent removal in a tax reform stage. In a two-period model, I assume that perfectly competitive foreign investors are uncertain about the host country government's propensity for public spending, and that infinitely...

We construct the ratio of the post-fisc to the pre-fisc transitory component of the variance of family incomes in Canada from 1993 and 2008. The ratio measures how much the tax and transfer system attenuates market income instability. It is shown that the ratio of variances is equivalent...

We consider an R&D-driven endogenous growth model in which innovation is risky and agents are risk averse. Growth is determined by the occupational choice of agents who can either work in production for a wage or become entrepreneurs. In this context, we examine the impact of redistributive...

The development of the welfare state in the Western economies between 1930 and 1990 coincided with a puzzling pattern in the taxation of top incomes. Effective tax rates at the top increased sharply but then gradually decreased, even as social transfers continued rising. We propose a new theory...