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Takahashi (2014) has uncovered coding errors in our paper, Chang and Kim (2007)—henceforth, CK. We acknowledge and are embarrassed by these mistakes. We are grateful to Takahashi for uncovering them. While the correction decreases the volatility of the labor market wedge, we find that the main message of CK remains valid: the measured labor market wedge arises endogenously in an economy with incomplete capital markets and indivisible labor supply. For example, our model accounts for 18 percent of the volatility in the labor market wedge in the data; it was 43 percent in CK. (JEL D31, E32, J22, J24, J31)

We demonstrate that aggregate employment and consumption can increase without a corresponding movement in productivity in a model with heterogeneous agents where the only aggregate disturbance is a productivity shock. The interaction between incomplete capital markets and indivisible labor results in a low employment-productivity correlation and creates a time-varying wedge between the marginal rate of substitution (for commodity consumption and hours) and productivity. Our results caution against viewing the measured wedge as an inefficiency due to a failure of labor-market clearing or as a fundamental driving force behind business cycles. (JEL D31, E32, J22, J24, J31)

We develop a quantitative heterogeneous-agents general equilibrium model that reproduces the income inequalities of 32 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Using this model, we compute the optimal income tax rate for each country under the equal-weight utilitarian social welfare function. We simulate the voting outcome for the utilitarian optimal tax reform for each country. Finally, we uncover the Pareto weights in the social welfare functions of each country that justify the current redistribution policy.

We construct a family model of labor supply that features adjustment along both the intensive and extensive margin. Intensive margin adjsutment is restricted to two values: full-time work and part-time work. Using simulated data from the steady state of the calibrated model, we examine whether standard labor supply regressions can uncover the true value of the intertemporal elasticity of labor supply parameter. We find positive estimated elasticities that are larger for women and that are highly significant, but they bear virtually no relationship to the underlying preference parameters.