We study, theoretically and quantitatively, the equilibrium of an unsecured consumer credit industry where credit-suppliers take deposits at a given interest rate and offer loans to households via a menu of credit levels and associated interest rates. The loan industry is competitive, with free...

Slow technological progress and financial sectors with low productivity are endemic among developing countries. This paper presents a model in which technological progress a.ects the productivity of the financial sector. When the technological progress is fast, the financial intermediation costs...

This paper computes the optimal progressivity of the income tax code in a dynamic general equilibrium model with household heterogeneity in which uninsurable labor productivity risk gives rise to a nontrivial income and wealth distribution. A progressive tax system serves as a partial substitute...

Habit formation has been proposed as a possible solution for explaining the equity premium puzzle. This paper extends the class of models that support the habits explanation in order to account for heterogeneity in earnings, wealth, habits and consumption. I find that habit formation increases...

Over the past twenty years there has been a 87% increase of the married women's employment rate and a 48% decrease of the fertility rate in Spain. This paper focus on the increase of the marital dissolution rate, following the introduction of the Divorce Law at the beginning of the eighties, as...

The dynamic heterogeneous economies studied are described by a collection of heterogenous indi- viduals, their individual states and an aggregate state, such that the individuals' actions are given by the policy obtained from an optimization program and the aggregate law of motion is given by...

This paper presents a neoclassical growth model with financial intermediation in which government expenditure is used to enforce the law. Government expenditure increases the probability that the financial contract are enforced and reduces financial intermediation costs. There is a feed back...

This paper presents a model in which technological change increases the share of reproducible factors at the expense of nonreproducible ones. When reproducible factors are abundant, firms have incentives to adopt technologies that are intensive in such resources, and this increases the...

There are some empirical facts that growth models usually cannot explain: i) the di.erences in consumption growth rates across countries when international capital markets are considered, ii) the low growth and low levels of education in developing countries where the return on education is very...

This paper uses a seminonparametric model and Consumer Expenditure Survey data to estimate life cycle profiles of consumption, controlling for demographics, cohort and time effects. In addition to documenting profiles for total and nondurable consumption, we devote special attention to the age...