Legislation dealing with consumer default has consistently struggled with an important trade-off: more debt forgiveness directly benefits households but indirectly makes credit more expensive. Complicating the issue is that part of the risk households face is aggregate risk. This paper asks,...

Theoretical formulations of dynamic heterogeneous-agent economies typically include a distribution as an aggregate state variable. This paper introduces a method for computing equilibrium of these models by including a distribution directly as a state variable if it is finite-dimensional or a...

We develop a quantitative model of higher education to test explanations for the steep rise in college tuition between 1987 and 2010. The framework extends the quality-maximizing college paradigm of Epple, Romano, Sarpca, and Sieg (2013) and embeds it in an incomplete markets, life-cycle...

A divide and conquer algorithm for exploiting policy function monotonicity is proposed and analyzed. To solve a discrete problem with n states and n choices, the algorithm requires at most n log2(n) 5n objective function evaluations. In contrast, existing methods for non-concave problems require...

A calibration strategy tries to match target moments using a model's parameters. We propose tests for determining whether this is possible. The tests use moments at random parameter draws to assess whether the target moments are similar to the computed ones (evidence of existence) or appear to...

Taste shocks result in nondegenerate choice probabilities, smooth policy functions, continuous demand correspondences, and reduced computational errors. They also cause significant computational cost when the number of choices is large. However, I show that, in many economic models, a...

What is the optimal consumer bankruptcy law? I examine this question in the context of an incomplete markets lifecycle model with a planner who can choose state-contingent bankruptcy costs. I develop two key theoretical characterizations. First, the optimal policy has a bang-bang property: The...