We study a variant of the conventional keeping-up-with-the-Joneses setup in which heterogeneous-ability agents care both about consumption and leisure and receive an utility premium if their consumption exceeds that of the Joneses'. Unlike the conventional setup in which all agents are assumed...

Evidence supports the notion that those who grow up to be patient dobetter than those who do not. Parents can inculcate the virtue of delayedgratiÂ…cation in their children by taking the right actions. We study a modelin which parents, for selÂ…sh reasons, invest resources to raise patient...

The tug-o-war for supremacy between inflation targeting and monetary targeting is a classic yet timely topic in monetary economics. In this paper, we revisit this question within the context of a pure-exchange overlapping generations model of money where spatial separation and random relocation...

This paper builds a model in which the distribution of income matters for capital formation, and uses it to analyze the effects of a simple policy intended to create a more equal distribution of income on the severity of certain credit market imperfections and, through this channel, capital...

This paper studies a overlapping generations economy with capital where limited communication and stochastic relocation create an endogenous transactions role for fiat money. We assume a production function with a knowledge-externality (Romer-style) that nests economies with endogenous growth...

In this paper, we study a decentralized monetary economy with a specified set of markets, rules of trade, an equilibrium concept, and a restricted set of policies and derive a set of equilibrium (monetary) allocations. Next we set up a simpler constrained planning problem in which we restrict...

Central banks typically find it difficult to turn off the "political pressure valve". This has important consequences for the types of monetary policies they implement. This paper presents an analysis of how political factors may come into play in the equilibrium determination of inflation. We...

In models of money with an infinitely-lived representative agent (ILRA models), the optimal monetary policy is almost always the Friedman rule. Overlapping generations (OG) models are different: in this paper, we study how they are different, and why. We investigate the welfare properties of...

This paper clarifies and extends previous work on the equivalence between monetary regimes and fiscal regimes involving social security systems. We show that monetary regimes of the type we study are equivalent to two alternative types of social security regimes. This result has two important...

Researchers have incorporated labor or credit market frictions in isolation within simple neoclassical models to open up a role for institutions, inject realism into their models and examine the impact of these distortions on output and employment. We present an overlapping generations model...