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Jel Classification:E21 

Working Paper
What we don’t know doesn’t hurt us: rational inattention and the permanent income hypothesis in general equilibrium

This paper derives the general equilibrium effects of rational inattention (or RI; Sims 2003,2010) in a model of incomplete income insurance (Huggett 1993, Wang 2003). We show that,under the assumption of CARA utility with Gaussian shocks, the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) arises in steady state equilibrium due to a balancing of precautionary savings and impatience. We then explore how RI affects the equilibrium joint dynamics of consumption, income and wealth, and find that elastic attention can make the model fit the data better. We finally show that the welfare costs of incomplete ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 14-14

Report
Modigliani Meets Minsky: Inequality, Debt, and Financial Fragility in America, 1950-2016

This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level data set that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The data show that increased borrowing by middle-class families with low income growth played a central role in rising indebtedness. Debt-to-income ratios have risen most dramatically for households between the 50th and 90th percentiles of the income distribution. While their income growth was low, ...
Staff Reports , Paper 924

Working Paper
In the Driver's Seat: Pandemic Fiscal Stimulus and Light Vehicles

This paper explores the impact of two fiscal programs, the Economic Impact Payments and the Paycheck Protection Program, on vehicle purchases and relates our findings to post-pandemic price pressures. We find that receiving a stimulus check increased the probability of purchasing new vehicles. In addition, the disbursement of funds from the Paycheck Protection Program was associated with a rise in local new car registrations. Our estimates indicate that these two programs account for a boost of 1 3/4 million units—or 12 percent—to new car sales in 2020. Furthermore, the induced ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2024-013

Working Paper
Health Shocks, Health Insurance, Human Capital, and the Dynamics of Earnings and Health

We specify and calibrate a life-cycle model of labor supply and savings incorporating health shocks and medical treatment decisions. Our model features endogenous wage formation via human capital accumulation, employer-sponsored health insurance, and means-tested social insurance. We use the model to study the effects of health shocks on health, labor supply and earnings, and to assess how health shocks contribute to earnings inequality. We also simulate provision of public insurance to agents who lack employer-sponsored insurance. The public insurance program substantially increases medical ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 080

Working Paper
Credit, bankruptcy, and aggregate fluctuations

We ask two questions related to how access to credit affects the nature of business cycles. First, does the standard theory of unsecured credit account for the high volatility and procyclicality of credit and the high volatility and countercyclicality of bankruptcy filings found in U.S. data? Yes, it does, but only if we explicitly model recessions as displaying countercyclical earnings risk (i.e., rather than having all households fare slightly worse than normal during recessions, we ensure that more households than normal fare very poorly). Second, does access to credit smooth aggregate ...
Working Papers , Paper 14-31

Working Paper
Human Capital Risk, Contract Enforcement, and the Macroeconomy

We use data from the Survey of Consumer Finance and Survey of Income Program Participation to show that young households with children are under-insured against the risk that an adult member of the household dies. We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with human capital risk, age-dependent returns to human capital investment, and endogenous borrowing constraints due to the limited pledgeability of human capital (limited contract enforcement). We show analytically that, consistent with the life insurance data, in equilibrium young households are borrowing constrained and under-insured ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2014-9

Working Paper
Dynamic Labor Reallocation with Heterogeneous Skills and Uninsured Idiosyncratic Risk

Occupational specificity of human capital motivates an important role of occupationalreallocation for the economy’s response to shocks and for the dynamics of inequality.We introduce occupational mobility, through a random choice model with dynamicvalue function optimization, into a multi-sector/multi-occupation Bewley (1980)-Aiyagari (1994) model with heterogeneous income risk, liquid and illiquid assets, priceadjustment costs, and in which households differ by their occupation-specific skills.Labor income is a combination of endogenous occupational wages and idiosyncraticshock. ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2021-16

Working Paper
Household's Balance Sheets and the Effect of Fiscal Policy

Using households' balance sheet composition in the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, we identify six household types. Since 1999, there has been a decline in the share of patient households and an increase in the share of impatient households with negative wealth. Using a six-agent New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions, we explore how changes in households' shares affect the transmission of government spending shocks. We show that the relative share of households in the left tail of the wealth distribution plays a key role in the aggregate marginal propensity to consume, the ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2018-012r1

Working Paper
Household Debt and the Heterogeneous Effects of Forward Guidance

We develop an incomplete-markets heterogeneous agent New-Keynesian (HANK) model in which households are allowed to lend and borrow, subject to a borrowing constraint. We show that, in this framework, forward guidance, that is the promise by the central bank to lower future interest rates, can be a powerful policy tool, especially when the economy is in a liquidity trap. In our model, the power of forward guidance is amplified by three redistributive channels, absent in a representative agent new- Keynesian model (RANK) or in a HANK model without private debt. First, expected lower rates imply ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1267

Working Paper
Taxing top earners: a human capital perspective

We assess the consequences of substantially increasing the marginal tax rate on U.S. top earners using a human capital model. The top of the model Laffer curve occurs at a 53 percent top tax rate. Tax revenues and the tax rate at the top of the Laffer curve are smaller compared to an otherwise similar model that ignores the possibility of skill change in response to a tax reform. We also show that if one applies the methods used by Diamond and Saez (2011) to provide quantitative guidance for setting the tax rate on top earners to model data then the resulting tax rate exceeds the tax rate at ...
Working Papers , Paper 2014-17

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