When asset values fall, the owners of collateralized loans are not in an enviable position. Nonetheless, they possess a kind of monopoly power over their borrowers that they do not possess when borrowers are solvent. Lenders maximize profits by price discriminating, but create deadweight costs...

Aggregate consumption Euler equations fit financial asset return data poorly. But they fit the return on the capital stock well, which leads us to three empirical findings relating to the capital income tax burden. First, capital taxation drives a wedge between consumption growth and the...

The stochastic discount factor seems volatile, but is this observation of any consequence for aggregate analysis of consumption, capital accumulation, output, etc.? I amend the standard frictionless model of aggregate consumption and capital accumulation with time-varying subjective probability...

This paper accepts for the sake of argument the hypothesis that much of the time series correlation between tax and profit rates is spurious, and shows how nonetheless time series for profit rates, tax rates, and consumption can be organized, compared and interpreted using Fisher's (1930) theory...

Aggregate time series data are used to calculate the incidence of capital taxes. Part of the analysis is borrowed from the literature on sales tax incidence, comparing pre-tax interest rates with tax rates. The other part compares tax rates with after-tax interest rates, which are measured...

Financial economics research has suggested that expected returns are not the same across assets, and that their movements over time are not simply described or explained. I argue that this suggestion has implications for the study of substitution over time --namely that 'the' interest rate in...

I prove some theorems for competitive equilibria in the presence of market distortions, and use those theorems to motivate an algorithm for (simply and exactly) computing and empirically evaluating competitive equilibria for dynamic economies. Although a competitive equilibrium models...

I construct direct measures of labor-leisure distortions for the American economy during the period 1889-1996, using a new method for empirically evaluating competitive equilibrium models and extending that method to some noncompetitive situations. I then compare measured labor-leisure...

I suggest that the aggregate implications of indivisible labor are few, and subtle. First, I model behavior in an 'indivisible labor' environment like those of Diamond and Mirrlees (1978, 1986), Hansen (1985), Rogerson (1988), Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992) and show that aggregate behavior in...

Based on published estimates of its price elasticity of demand and of tax wedges, as well as the method of revealed preference, I estimate that the annual social value of ESI is about $1.5 trillion beyond what policyholders, their employers, and taxpayers pay for it. The private component of...