Working Papers and Works in Progress
September 2024.
This paper studies the trade-offs associated with income redistribution in an overlapping generations model in which marginal savings rates increase with permanent income. By transferring permanent income from high savers to low savers, redistribution lowers aggregate savings, and depresses investment in capital. If more capital is welfare improving, the government faces a trade-off between redistribution and investment which depends on the distribution of marginal propensties to save. I estimate this distribution using U.S. household panel data, and use my estimates to calibrate a quantitative overlapping generations model with un-insurable idiosyncratic earnings risk. I study the effects of a simple labor income redistribution policy in this calibrated model and a standard model with homogeneous marginal savings rates. The direct effect of the policy on the permanent income distribution has no effect on capital in a standard model, but a large effect in the calibrated model. This channel accounts for 23% of the drop in aggregate consumption following the policy.
The Savings Wedge (with Alexandre Gaillard and Philipp Wangner)
April 2025
We characterize the wedge between the private and social value of saving using a novel sufficient statistic.
Publications and Papers Under Review
Journal of Political Economy: Macroeconomics (September 2025)
Revise and Resubmit: Quarterly Journal of Economics