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Working Paper
Family and Government Insurance: Wage, Earnings, and Income Risks in the Netherlands and the U.S.
We document new facts about risk in male wages and earnings, household earnings, and pre- and post-tax income in the Netherlands and the United States. We find that, in both countries, earnings display important deviations from the typical assumptions of linearity and normality. Individual-level male wage and earnings risk is relatively high at the beginning and end of the working life, and for those in the lower and upper parts of the income distribution. Hours are the main driver of the negative skewness and, to a lesser extent, the high kurtosis of earnings changes. Even though we find no ...
Working Paper
Optimal Social Insurance and Rising Labor Market Risk
This paper analyzes the optimal response of the social insurance system to a rise in labor market risk. To this end, we develop a tractable macroeconomic model with risk-free physical capital, risky human capital (labor market risk) and unobservable effort choice affecting the distribution of human capital shocks (moral hazard). We show that constrained optimal allocations are simple in the sense that they can be found by solving a static social planner problem. We further show that constrained optimal allocations are the equilibrium allocations of a market economy in which the government ...
Working Paper
Aggregate Dynamics in Mirrlees Economies: The Case of Persistent Shocks
I consider a neoclassical growth model with endogenous labor supply in which agents have private information about their idiosyncratic value of leisure. A key assumption is that these shocks follow a persistent stochastic process over time. For this economy I solve the economy-wide mechanism design problem of a social planner that seeks to maximize the welfare of agents, subject to incentive compatibility, promise-keeping, threat-keeping, and aggregate feasibility constraints. When preferences over consumption and leisure are logarithmic, I obtain a strong analytical result: All macroeconomic ...
Working Paper
Who is screened out of social insurance programs by entry barriers? Evidence from consumer bankruptcies
Entry barriers into social insurance programs will be effective screening devices if they cause only those individuals receiving higher benefits from a program to participate in that program. We find evidence for this by using plausibly exogenous variations in travel-related entry costs into the Canadian consumer bankruptcy system. Using detailed balance sheet and travel data, we find that higher travel-related entry costs reduce bankruptcies from individuals with lower financial benefits of bankruptcy (unsecured debt discharged, minus secured assets forgone). When compared across filers, ...
Report
On the Distribution of the Welfare Losses of Large Recessions
How big are the welfare losses from severe economic downturns, such as the U.S. Great Recession? How are those losses distributed across the population? In this paper we answer these questions using a canonical business cycle model featuring household income and wealth heterogeneity that matches micro data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). We document how these losses are distributed across households and how they are affected by social insurance policies. We find that the welfare cost of losing one?s job in a severe recession ranges from 2% of lifetime consumption for the ...