We document large differences in lifetime hours of work using data from the NLSY79 and argue that these differences are an important source of inequality in lifetime earnings. To establish this we develop and calibrate a rich heterogeneous agent model of labor supply and human capital...

The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a central source of US labor market data. We show that, for a few thousand dollars, researchers can quickly design and implement their own online survey to supplement the CPS. The survey closely follows core features of the CPS, ensuring that outcomes are...

This paper considers the impact of endogenous human capital accumulation on optimal tax policy in a life cycle model. Including endogenous human capital accumulation, either through learning-by-doing or learning-or-doing, is analytically shown to create a motive for the government to use...

An equilibrium concept in the Debreu (1954) theory-of-value tradition is developed for a class of adverse selection economies and applied to the Spence signaling and Rothschild-Stiglitz (1976) adverse selection environments. The equilibrium exists and is optimal. Further, all equilibria have the...

This paper builds a computational life cycle model and simulates the Great Depression in order to assess the historical welfare implications of implementing Social Security during this business cycle episode. A well established result in the literature is that when comparing steady states with...

This paper considers the impact of endogenous human capital accumulation on optimal tax policy in a life cycle model. Including endogenous human capital accumulation, either through learning-by-doing or learning-or-doing, is analytically shown to create a motive for the government to use...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the composition of inflation over time. The authors calculate the contributions to inflation for individual series of the consumer price index (CPI) and personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI) and then aggregate those contributions into major...

This paper studies the effectiveness of the social security program as an insurance mechanism against unanticipated catastrophic shocks to the household balance sheets. Our framework is an overlapping generations (OLG) life cycle model with uninsurable idiosyncratic earnings risk, lifetime...