About 80 years ago Fredderick Soddy was probably the first scientist pointing out the importance of the second law of thermodynamics in the economy. Up today the majority of economists don't pay any attention to this fact, proved in the mean time quantitatively. The present world financial...

When government debt is sluggish, consumption exhibits lower expected growth, more long-run uncertainty, and more long-run downside risk. Simultaneously, the risk premium on the consumption claim (Koijen et al. (2010), Lustig et al. (2013)) increases and features more positive (adverse)...

Tax rates have fluctuated considerably since federal income taxes were introduced in the United States in 1913. This paper analyzes the effects of stochastic taxation on asset prices in a dynamic general equilibrium model. Stochastic taxation affects the after-tax returns of both risky and safe...

This paper summarizes the current state of research on how taxation affects household decisions with respect to portfolio structure and asset trading. It discusses long-standing issues, such as the impact of differential taxation of income flows from stocks and bonds on the incentives for...

This paper studies Pareto-optimal risk-sharing arrangements in a private information economy with aggregate uncertainty and ex ante heterogeneous agents. I show how to implement Pareto-optima as equilibria when agents can trade claims to consumption contingent on aggregate shocks in financial...

The opponents of financial transactions taxes (FTTs) have argued that the imposition of such taxes will slow economic growth by raising the cost of capital. The argument is that if the cost of buying and selling stock and other financial assets is higher, then it makes it more expensive for...

We consider optimal taxation in a model with wealth-poor and wealth-rich households, where wealth derives from business capital and home ownership, and investigate the consequences of a rising wealth inequality at steady state on these tax rates. The optimal tax structure includes some taxation...

We find that the offer price of a private investment in public equity (PIPE) is lower than the prevailing market price (i.e., large discount) when the tax rate on investors’ capital gains is high. Using unique data on PIPE investor identities (which are not available for initial public...

The recent fiscal crisis in the EU and the slow-down of the BRICS countries have raised world-wide concerns about future global growth prospects. We examine the role of doubts about both local and foreign economic shocks by constructing an international endogenous growth model with technology...

The mutuel handle, or the total volume of wagering at a racetrack, has important implications for both racetrack and state revenues. This paper studies the factors that determine the dollar volume of wagering. One factor we study is of particular interest because it is both large and new to the...