The paper studies asset pricing in informationally decentralized markets. These markets have two key frictions: trading is decentralized (bilateral), and some agents have private information. We analyze how uninformed agents acquire information over time from their bilateral trades. In...

Innovative activities have public good characteristics in the sense that the cost of producing the innovation is high compared to the cost of producing subsequent units. Moreover, knowledge of how to produce subsequent units is widely known once the innovation has occurred and is, therefore,...

We study the dynamic taxation of capital and labor in the Ramsey model under the assumption that taxes and public good provision are decided by a self-interested politician who cannot commit to policies. We show that, as long as the discount factor of the politician is equal to or greater than...

We study the constrained Pareto efficient allocations in a dynamic production economy in which the group that holds political power decides the allocation of resources. We show that Pareto efficient allocations take a quasi-Markovian structure and can be represented recursively as a function of...

This paper develops a model of a monetary economy in which individual firms are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks as well as general inflation. Sellers can change price only by incurring a real menu cost.' We calibrate this cost and the variance and autocorrelation of the...

We develop a unified framework for optimally managing public portfolios for a class of macro-finance models that include widely-used specifications for households' risk and liquidity preferences, market structures for financial assets, and trading frictions. An optimal portfolio hedges...

The dynamic public finance literature underwent significant changes over the past decade. This research agenda has now reached a stage at which it is able to analyze the design of social insurance programs and optimal taxation in rich environments that can be closely matched to microeconomic...

We develop a dynamic theory of resource wars and study the conditions under which such wars can be prevented. The interaction between the scarcity of resources and the incentives for war in the presence of limited commitment is at the center of our theory. We show that a key parameter...

We examine a prominent justification for capital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. In an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption, we derive an analytical expression that reveals the forces...

We study how Americans respond to idiosyncratic and exogenous changes in household wealth and unearned income. Our analyses combine administrative data on U.S. lottery winners with an event-study design that exploits variation in the timing of lottery wins. Our first contribution is to estimate...