In this paper, I consider two normative questions: (1) how should policymakers approach tradeoffs that involve different age groups, and (2) at what rate should policymakers discount the consumption of future generations? I demonstrate that, under standard assumptions, these two questions are equivalent: caring more about the future means caring less about the elderly. Even small differences between the social discount rate and the market interest rate can have significant quantitative implications for the relative value placed on the consumption of different age groups.

Decreasing returns at the macro level are an outcome of efficiency at the micro level. When inputs are scarce, an efficient economy carries out only the most productive projects; when inputs are abundant, the economy implements less productive projects as well. This link between decreasing returns and efficiency suggests that misallocation can reduce the extent of aggregate decreasing returns. I formalize this connection and establish two main results: (i) misallocation amplifies the volatility of output with respect to fluctuations in inputs; and (ii) financial integration amplifies shocks in relatively distorted economies, but mitigates them in less distorted economies. (JEL D24, D82, E23, E32, E44, F41)

How much should society be willing to pay for reducing inequality? The standard approach to this normative question relates inequality aversion to risk aversion by treating inequality as an outcome of a lottery. However, in the presence of heterogeneous risk preferences, it is unclear whose preferences should be used for evaluating this lottery. This paper derives a social welfare function as a limit of an iterative procedure, in which each iteration constructs a lottery based on the certainty equivalents from the previous iteration. The limit of this procedure can be interpreted as the equally distributed equivalent of the initial allocation.

We propose a measure of the extent to which a financial institution is connected to the real economy. The Share of Core Assets (SCA) is a measure of the composition of assets – namely, the share of credit to the non-financial sectors (households, firms, and governments) out of total credit market instruments. We construct the SCA for more than 3700 U.S. bank holding companies. An asset weighted average of the SCA declines by 20 percentage points in the period 1995:1 to 2012:4 (from 76% to 56%); it then increases by about 10 percentage points in the period 2013:1 to 2016:4. We explore the extent to which risk-sharing among banks and efficiency of capital allocation can explain the cross-sectional dispersion of our measure, and we find that these two motives account for between 6% and 10% of the cross-sectional variation of the SCA, depending on the sample used. Finally, using a vector autoregression model (VAR), we find that an increase in the average connection between banks and the real economy increases the growth rate of the GDP.