The U.S. tax policy on health insurance favors only those offered a group insurance through their employers. This policy is highly regressive since the subsidy takes the form of deductions from the progressive tax system. The paper investigates alternatives to the current policy. We find that...

This paper uses a novel method for conducting policy analysis with potentially misspecified DSGE models (Del Negro and Schorfheide 2004) and applies it to a simple New Keynesian DSGE model. We illustrate the sensitivity of the results to assumptions on the policy invariance of model...

This paper develops a new and easily implementable necessary and sufficient condition for the exact identification of a Markov-switching structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model. The theorem applies to models with both linear and some nonlinear restrictions on the structural parameters. We...

The quintessential crime of the information age is identity theft, the malicious use of personal identifying data. In this paper we model "identity" and its use in credit transactions. Various types of identity theft occur in equilibrium, including "new account fraud," "existing account fraud,"...

Common practice in the housing and wealth distribution literature has proceeded as if the modeling of housing rental markets was unnecessary due to renters’ relative low levels of wealth and the small fraction they represent in the total population. This paper shows, however, that their...

This paper studies the econometrics of computed dynamic models. Since these models generally lack a closed-form solution, economists approximate the policy functions of the agents in the model with numerical methods. But this implies that, instead of the exact likelihood function, the researcher...

We integrate the housing market and the labor market in a dynamic general equilibrium model with credit and search frictions. The model is confronted with the U.S. macroeconomic time series. Our estimated model can account for two prominent facts observed in the data. First, the land price and...

This paper considers two alternative formulations of the linear factor model (LFM) with nontraded factors. The first formulation is the traditional LFM, where the estimation of risk premia and alphas is performed by means of a cross-sectional regression of average returns on betas. The second...