We develop a search model with risk-averse households to study the impact of tax progressivity on labor supply and income inequality across education groups. Labor supply responses are considered along both intensive and extensive margins. Our quantitative results are consistent with those of the existing empirical literature. First, we find that a decline in tax progressivity associated with the Tax Reform Act of 1986 has a significant impact on the aggregate labor supply with approximately 61 percent occurred along the extensive margin. Second, households differ in their labor and income responses to tax reform. A decline in tax progressivity changes the income composition of each household by affecting labor supplies and asset holdings. This leads to an increase in income inequality. Therefore, the tax share paid by the most educated group rises due to an increase in capital income after tax reforms are instituted.

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We analyze sunspot-driven fluctuations in a standard neoclassical growth model with money holdings and public spending. In our economy, money is needed for transaction purpose, while public spending is financed through a flat income tax. Public spending includes an incompressible component and a variable part, and the latter exerts positive externalities on private utility or production. Our theoretical results show that the composition of public spending and externalities have important effects on local stability properties. First, in the absence of externalities, there is a unique steady state, and local indeterminacy depends on the interplay between the share of the cash-in-advance constraint and the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of consumption. Second, in the presence of externalities, multiple equilibria might emerge under weak enough production externality, while uniqueness of the steady state prevails under strong production or under consumption externality. We further show that weak production/consumption externality or strong consumption externality could generate local (in)determinacy of the steady state depending on the share of the cash-in-advance constraint while strong production externality generates local determinacy of the steady state. Finally, based on numerical examples, we show that an increase in the variable public spending and the income tax rate exert a local stabilizing effect while externalities promote locally the likelihood of local indeterminacy.

The market price is a convex function of information when short sales are constrained. Borrowing constraints limit investors to bidding up the price. The two effects imply an asymmetric return-volatility correlation (RVC) when information shifts. We build a model to show that: (i) short selling decreases RVC, while margin trading increases RVC; (ii) RVC increases with disagreement; and (iii) RVC increases with returns. The Chinese stock market is ideal for the empirical test because only certain stocks are eligible for short selling and margin trading in the slow policy adoption process. We obtain evidence to support the theoretical predictions correlation.

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