The U.S. national saving rate has been declining since the 1960s while the share of consumption in output has been increasing. We explore if a standard growth model can explain the secular movements observed in this time period. Our quantitative findings indicate that the standard neoclassical...

Much of the existing literature on social security has taken the extreme assumption that individuals have little or no altruism; this paper takes an opposite assumption that there is full two-sided altruism. When households insure members that belong to the same family line, privatizing social...

We compute the welfare effects of different revenue-neutral tax reforms that eliminate capital income taxation in two general equilibrium models calibrated to the U.S. economy. In our dynastic model, the reform with the largest welfare gain is the one that eliminates all income taxation and...

In this paper we consider a general equilibrium model where heterogeneous agents specialize either in legitimate market activities or in criminal activities and majority rule determines the share of income redistributed and the expenditures devoted to the apprehension of criminals. We calibrate...

The authors’ dynamic equilibrium model guides their quantitative investigation of the major determinants of property-crime patterns in the U.S. The model is capable of reproducing the drop in property crime that occurred between 1980 and 1996. The most important influences on the decline are a...

The potential welfare benefits of unemployment insurance, along with the optimal replacement ratio, are studied using a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model. To provide a role for unemployment insurance, agents in the authors' economy face exogenous idiosyncratic employment shocks and...

In this paper we examine the role of social security in an economy populated by overlapping generations of individuals with time-inconsistent preferences who face mortality risk, individual income risk, and borrowing constraints. We find that unfunded social security lowers the capital stock,...