The debate between structural and reduced-form approaches has generated substantial
controversy in applied economics. This article reviews a recent literature in public …

This paper reviews recent advances in the theory of optimal policy in a dynamic Mirrlees
setting, and contrasts this approach to the one based on the representative-agent Ramsey …

We conduct a comparative welfare analysis of 133 historical policy changes over the past
half-century in the United States, focusing on policies in social insurance, education and job …

When people can self-insure via migration, they may have less need for informal risk
sharing. At the same time, informal insurance may reduce the need to migrate. To …

In an influential paper, Baily (1978) showed that the optimal level of unemployment
insurance (UI) in a stylized static model depends on only three parameters: risk aversion, the …

This paper derives optimal income tax and human capital policies in a life cycle model with
risky human capital. The government faces asymmetric information regarding agents' ability …

We study the design of interventions to stabilize financial markets plagued by adverse
selection. Our contribution is to analyze the information revealed by participation decisions …

In this paper, I consider a dynamic economy in which a government needs to finance a
stochastic process of purchases. The agents in the economy are privately informed about …

This paper studies a Diamond-Dybvig model of providing insurance against unobservable
liquidity shocks in the presence of unobservable trades. We show that competitive equilibria …

We survey the literature on social insurance, focusing on recent work that has connected
theory to evidence to make quantitative statements about welfare and optimal policy. Our …