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Savings after Retirement: A Survey
Retired U.S. households, especially those with high income, decumulate their assets more slowly than implied by the basic life cycle model. The observed patterns of out-of-pocket medical expenses, which rise quickly with age and income during retirement, and longevity, which also rises with income, can explain a significant portion of U.S. retirement saving. However, more work is needed to disentangle these precautionary motives from other motives, such as the desire to leave bequests.
Individuals, married couples respond differently to U.S. income tax changes
Changes in effective income taxes can impact labor supply with different outcomes for married couples and singles, and changes can have a particularly notable impact on married women.
Report
Taxation, entrepreneurship, and wealth
Entrepreneurship is a key determinant of investment, saving, and wealth inequality. We study the aggregate and distributional effects of several tax reforms in a model that recognizes this key role and that matches the large wealth inequality observed in the U.S. data. The aggregate effects of tax reforms can be particularly large when they affect small and medium-sized businesses, which face the most severe financial constraints, rather than big businesses. The consequences of changes in the estate tax depend heavily on the size of its exemption level. The current effective estate tax system ...
Journal Article
Medicaid and the elderly
In 2009, Medicaid spent over $75 billion on 5.3 million elderly beneficiaries. This article describes the Medicaid rules for the elderly and discusses their economic implications.
Working Paper
Subjective Earnings and Employment Dynamics
We develop a new approach to estimating earnings, job, and employment dynamics using subjective expectations data from the NY Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations. These data provide beliefs about future earnings offers and acceptance probabilities, offering direct information on counterfactual outcomes and enabling identification under weaker assumptions. Our framework avoids biases from selection and unobserved heterogeneity that affect models using realized outcomes. First-step fixed-effects regressions identify risk, persistence, and transition effects; second-step GMM recovers the ...
Working Paper
Taxation, entrepreneurship, and wealth
Entrepreneurship is a key determinant of investment, saving, and wealth inequality. We study the aggregate and distributional effects of several tax reforms in a model that recognizes this key role and that matches the large wealth inequality observed in the U.S. data. The aggregate effects of tax reforms can be particularly large when they affect small and medium-sized businesses, which face the most severe financial constraints, rather than big businesses. The consequences of changes in the estate tax depend heavily on the size of its exemption level. The current effective estate tax system ...
Journal Article
The asset-backed securities markets, the crisis and TALF
The authors explain the role of asset-backed securities markets in generating credit and liquidity and how this role was disrupted during the financial crisis. They discuss the implementation of the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) and argue that this program helped reestablish the ABS markets and the credit supply. and the reversion to a stable fiscal regime.
Working Paper
A conversation with 590 nascent entrepreneurs
This paper summarizes interviews from 1998 with 590 individuals trying to create a business centered around five questions: ?Who are you??, ?What are you trying to accomplish??, ?What have you and others put into the business??, ?What have you accomplished??, ?What remains to be done?? There is a great deal of heterogeneity across these Nascent entrepreneurs, but they tend to have more education than the general population. Growing up in a family in which one or both parents had a business does not seem to be an important determinant of entry into entrepreneurship for males, while it seems to ...
Working Paper
The Lost Ones: The Opportunities and Outcomes of Non-College-Educated Americans Born in the 1960s
White, non-college-educated Americans born in the 1960s face shorter life expectancies, higher medical expenses, and lower wages per unit of human capital compared with those born in the 1940s, and men's wages declined more than women's. After documenting these changes, we use a life-cycle model of couples and singles to evaluate their effects. The drop in wages depressed the labor supply of men and increased that of women, especially in married couples. Their shorter life expectancy reduced their retirement savings but the increase in out-of-pocket medical expenses increased them by more. ...
Working Paper
Entrepreneurship, frictions and wealth
Although the role of financial constraints on entrepreneurial choices has received considerable attention, the effects of these constraints on aggregate capital accumulation and wealth inequality are less known. Entrepreneurship is an important determinant of capital accumulation and wealth concentration and, conversely, the distribution of wealth affects entrepreneurial choices in presence of borrowing constraints. We construct a model that matches wealth inequality very well, both for entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs, and find that more restrictive borrowing constraints generate less ...