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Journal Article
Saving for Retirement with Job Loss Risk
This article studies a tractable theoretical model of optimal consumption and saving decisions with endogenous retirement. Particular attention is paid to the impact of an increase in the risk of losing one?s job on the optimal path of consumption and wealth accumulation. Even if one does not actually lose their job, an increase in the risk of a job loss is by itself sufficient to cause lower consumption, higher saving, and, through faster retirement, lower labor supply.
Working Paper
Private Information and Optimal Infant Industry Protection
We study infant industry protection using a dynamic model in which the industry's cost is initially higher than that of foreign competitors. The industry can stochastically lower its cost via learning by doing. Whether the industry has transitioned to low cost is private information. We use a mechanism-design approach to induce the industry to reveal its true cost. We show that (i) the optimal protection, measured by infant industry output, declines over time and is less than that under public information, (ii) the optimal protection policy is time consistent under public information but not ...
Working Paper
Optimal auditing and insurance in a dynamic model of tax compliance
We study the optimal auditing of a taxpayer?s income in a dynamic principal- agent model of hidden income. Taxpayers in our model initially have low income and stochastically transit to high income that is an absorbing state. A low-income taxpayer who transits to high income can underreport his true income and evade his taxes. With a constant absolute risk-aversion utility function and a costly and imperfect auditing technology, we show that the optimal auditing mechanism in our model consists of cycles. Within each cycle, a low-income taxpayer is initially unaudited, but if the duration of ...
Working Paper
Market-based incentives
We study optimal incentives in a principal-agent problem in which the agent's outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market. In equilibrium, strong performance increases the agent's market value. When this value becomes sufficiently high, the threat of the agent's quitting forces the principal to give the agent a raise. The prospect of obtaining this raise gives the agent an incentive to exert effort, which reduces the need for standard incentives, like bonuses. In fact, whenever the agent's option to quit is close to being "in the money," the market-induced ...
Journal Article
Who is concealing earnings and still collecting unemployment benefits?
Concealed earnings represent the largest source of fraud in the U.S. unemployment insurance system. Individuals with relatively low earnings constitute a larger fraction of those committing such fraud. High-earnings individuals, however, account for larger dollar amounts of this fraud.
Journal Article
Wealth Effects with Endogenous Retirement
In this article, we study wealth effects, i.e., the response of consumption to exogenous changes in wealth. We use a consumption-saving model with endogenous retirement to show that the endogenous response of the value of a worker's human capital to changes in her wealth helps to account for the weak wealth effects observed in the data.
Journal Article
Unemployment insurance fraud
Concealed Earnings fraud accounts for almost two-thirds of the total overpayments due to all fraud.
Journal Article
Cyclical Properties of Bank Margins: Small versus Large Banks
We study cyclical properties of the net interest margin (NIM) in the US banking sector in the aggregate as well as separately for small and large banks. In the aggregate and among large banks, NIM is countercyclical. Among small banks, however, NIM is procyclical. Further, we find that this result is driven by differences in the cyclical dynamics of small and large banks' funding costs rather than asset yields.
Working Paper
Private Information and Optimal Infant Industry Protection
We study infant industry protection using a dynamic model in which the industry's cost is initially higher than that of foreign competitors. The industry can stochastically lower its cost via learning by doing. Whether the industry has transitioned to low cost is private information. Using a mechanism-design approach, we solve for the optimal protection policy that induces the industry to reveal its true cost. We show that (i) optimal protection, measured by infant industry output, declines over time and is less than that under public information and (ii) eventual viability of the infant ...
Journal Article
Unemployment benefits: how much money goes unclaimed?
Not all who are eligible to receive unemployment benefits actually collect them.