I examine optimal taxes in an overlapping generations economy in which each consumer's utility depends on consumption relative to a weighted average of consumption by others (the benchmark level of consumption) as well as on the level of the consumer's own consumption. The socially optimal...

The crowding-out coefficient is the ratio of the reduction in privately-issued bonds to the increase in government bonds that are issued to finance a tax cut. If (1) Ricardian equivalence holds, and (2) households do not simultaneously borrow risklessly and have positive gross positions in other...

In this paper I analyze the relationships among investment, q, and cash flow in a tractable stochastic model in which marginal q and average q are identically equal. After analyzing the impact of changes in the distribution of the marginal operating profit of capital, I extend the model to...

I develop a dynamic model of leverage with tax deductible interest and an endogenous cost of default. The interest rate includes a premium to compensate lenders for expected losses in default. A borrowing constraint is generated by lenders' unwillingness to lend an amount that would trigger...

In an economy with identical infinitely-lived households that obtain utility from leisure as well as consumption, Chamley (1986) and Judd (1985) have shown that the optimal tax system to pay for an exogenous stream of government purchases involves a zero tax rate on capital in the long run, with...

I calculate exact expressions for risk premia, term premia, and the premium on levered equity in a framework that includes habit formation, keeping/catching up with the Joneses, and possible departures from rational expectations. Closed-form expressions for the first and second moments of...

Is the stock market boom a result of the baby boom? This paper develops an overlapping generations model in which a baby boom is modeled as a high realization of a random birth rate, and the price of capital is determined endogenously by a convex cost of adjustment. A baby boom increases...

The Modified Golden Rule, which relates the rate of return on capital and the growth rate of the capital stock along long-run growth paths that maximize the utility of a representative infinitely-lived consumer, is invariant to the introduction of convex capital adjustment costs. Therefore,...

The subjective distribution of growth rates of aggregate consumption is characterized by pessimism if it is first-order stochastically dominated by the objective distribution. Uniform pessimism is a leftward translation of the objective distribution of the logarithm of the growth rate. The...