Using a Bayesian SVAR analysis, we document that an increase in government purchases raises private consumption, the real wage and total factor productivity (TFP) while reducing inflation. Each of these facts is hard to reconcile with both neoclassical and New-Keynesian models. We extend a...

Earnings dynamics are much richer than typically assumed in macro models with heterogenous agents. This holds for individual-pre-tax and household-post-tax earnings and across administrative (Social Security Administration) and survey (Panel Study of Income Dynamics) data. We study the...

Earnings dynamics are much richer than those typically used in macro models with heterogenous agents. This paper provides multiple contributions. First, it proposes a simple non-parametric method to model rich earnings dynamics that is easy to estimate and introduce in structural models. Second,...

Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, discusses several factors affecting wealth inequality: rates of return on capital, output growth rates, tax progressivity, top income shares, and heterogeneity in saving rates and inheritances. This paper studies the role of various forces...

This paper extends Carroll's (2006) endogenous grid method and its combination with value function iteration by Barillas and Fernandez-Villaverde (2007) to a class of dynamic programming problems, such as problems with both discrete and continuous choices, in which the value function is...

We compare two large-scale policy interventions aimed at reducing crime: subsidizing high school completion and increasing the length of prison sentences. To this purpose we use a life-cycle model with endogenous education and crime choices. We apply the model to property crime and calibrate it...