The authors incorporate home production in a dynamic general equilibrium model of consumption and saving with illiquid housing and a collateralized borrowing constraint. They show that the model is capable of explaining life-cycle patterns of households' time use and consumption of different...

Because of the recent surge in U.S. personal defaults, Congress is currently debating bankruptcy reform legislation requiring a means test for Chapter 7 filers. This paper explores the effects of such a reform in a model where, in contrast to previous work, bankruptcy options and production are...

An analysis of existing U.S. bankruptcy law and its provisions suggests that they encourage people to borrow to save and that, in particular, Chapter 13 discourages labor effort. Evidently, three proposed reforms to the law — namely, a decrease in the asset exemption level, a reduction in wage...

Criticisms of endogenous growth models with flat rate taxes have highlighted two features that are not substantiated by the data. These models generally imply: (1) that economic growth must fall with the share of government expenditures in output across countries, and (2) that one-time shifts in...

We examine a model of the size distribution and growth of firms whereby firms learn about idiosyncratic productivity parameters. Aggregate shocks, by adding noise to learning at the firm level, can produce differentiated response across firms with their reactions depending on the position of the...

This paper studies the interaction of capital constraints with business formation, growth and destruction, and the policy implications of this interaction. A dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed and shown to be consistent with recent empirical finding on this subject. In the model,...

The growth in government loan guarantee programs relative to other forms of intervention in credit markets prompts the question: Are loan guarantees necessarily better than other subsidies, particularly direct loans and grants, in providing benefits to targeted groups? The answer is: not in all...

In this paper, we analyze the dynamic behavior of employment and hours worked per worker in a stochastic general equilibrium model with a matching mechanism between vacancies and unemployed workers. The model is estimated for the U.S. using the Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) estimation...

The East Asian financial crisis exposed the problems of excessive government intervention in credit allocation and poor supervision of the banking system. We argue that the crisis is an opportunity to reformulate the strategies of growth by way of eliminating politicized intervention on...