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Working Paper
Causal State-Dependent Local Projections
State-dependent local projections (LPs) are widely used to study how causal effects vary as a function of economic states, but shock exogeneity alone does not identify this response function. We show that identification follows when the underlying conditional mean is linear in the shock with a state-dependent coefficient, a condition satisfied in canonical micro-macro environments, including first-order perturbation solutions of heterogeneous-agent and macro-finance models. Even then, standard linear-interaction LPs generally recover only a projection of the response function, motivating LPs ...
Working Paper
Business Cycle Fluctuations in Mirrlees Economies: The Case of i.i.d. Shocks
I consider a real business cycle model in which agents have private information about the i.i.d. realizations of their value of leisure. For the case of logarithmic preferences I provide an analytical characterization of the solution to the associated mechanism design problem. Moreover, I show a striking irrelevance result: That the stationary behavior of all aggregate variables are exactly the same in the private information economy as in the full information case. Numerical simulations indicate that the irrelevance result approximately holds for more general CRRA preferences.
Working Paper
Implementing the Modified Golden Rule? Optimal Ramsey Capital Taxation with Incomplete Markets Revisited
What is the prescription of Ramsey capital taxation in the long run? Aiyagari (1995) addressed the question in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets (HAIM) economy, showing that a positive capital tax should be imposed to implement the so-called modified golden rule (MGR). In deriving the MGR result, Aiyagari (1995) implicitly assumed that the multiplier on the resource constraint of the Ramsey problem converges to a finite positive value in the limit. We first show that this implicit assumption has a strong implication for the shadow price of Ramsey taxation in the limit: it must go to ...