Papers

A family of working papers on distribution-contingent policy: how monetary, fiscal, competition, and tax instruments interact to determine the labor share of income. Across wages, debt, health care, and the direction of AI, the same externality recurs, a private gain against a common cost, and each paper works out one instrument that corrects it. All are posted on SSRN.

Monetary and fiscal

Certified Tolerance: First-Order Welfare in a New Keynesian Model

The tolerance clause, ranked rather than asserted: against a standard Taylor rule it dominates in demand-constrained states for stated distributional weights, costs nothing at full employment because its certificate is inert there, and can be adopted without forecasting which regime the economy is in. What carries the ranking is a first-order term, a better point to stabilize around, not better stabilization; the certificate is what keeps the clause from excusing real inflation. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7295899

The Wage Commons, Derived: From the Firm's Markdown to the Macro Wage Norm

The wage commons stops being a framing and becomes a theorem: each firm's wage-setting decision deletes the demand its own payroll finances, so the equilibrium labor share sits below the firms' own collective standard, and past a stated threshold suppression costs the suppressors themselves. The externality enters the standard New Keynesian model as one wedge in the Phillips curve, one term in the IS curve, and a wage rule with structural parameters.  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7292139

The Reaction-Function Ratchet: Wage Suppression as a Monetary Externality, and Its Correction 

Monetary policy that disciplines wages but tolerates margins ratchets the labor share down over the cycle, manufacturing the fiscal-dominance inflation it cannot later fight. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7073658

Gaming the Trigger: Strategic Pass-Through and Adoption Under Distribution-Contingent Monetary Policy 

Whether a distribution-contingent monetary tolerance rule can be gamed by strategic price-setters, and how to build the trigger so that gaming it becomes restraint. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7102178

The Base, Not the Rate: The Fiscal Instrument of Distribution-Contingent Monetary Policy 

A rent tax built on the margin base rather than the rate pairs with the monetary rule and resists pass-through, taxing the markup rather than marginal cost. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7102238

Two Inflations, One Price Index: Public Debt and the Labor Share

A suppressed labor share and a high public debt are one state, not two problems. Wage-led inflation is the only kind that erodes the debt while repairing the distribution that produced it, and a rule that reads only the price index tightens against it.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7182678

One Externality, Five Instruments: How Wage Suppression Built the Debt Trap, and the Design of the Exit

The capstone essay: the fall in the labor share and the rise in public debt are one fact, the debt being the accounting counterpart of the missing paychecks, and the exit prices the externality once, with one instrument per policy mistake. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7340778

The Mirror Glut: The Wage Commons in the Open Economy

The global savings glut is wage suppression abroad returning as captive demand for American debt. Opening the escape path gives the inflation levy a foreign leg and the rent base a leak, and yields a border discipline: capital controls admitted when gated on the wage statistic, tariffs excluded because they tax the very wage the path exists to raise.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7187238

The direction of AI

Classification Instruments Fail: A Pigouvian Correction for the Direction of AI Adoption

Taxes that sort technologies into declared kinds (robot taxes, displacement surcharges, registries) land their whole force on a boundary the firm itself draws; a levy on the shortfall in a firm's labor share prices the distorted margin directly, without defining AI. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7107538

Health care

The Missing Claimant: Healthcare's Cost Ratchet and the Design of Its Repair Health care has no residual claimant on its own cost: every agent is paid a share of the bill, so the cost base ratchets upward. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7106798

Repair the Claimants: De-Linking Compensation from the Cost Base to Break Healthcare's Cost Ratchet 

The design that severs each middleman's pay from the size of the bill, link by link. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7106878

Earlier Work

Goren, A., & Platonov, K. (2024). Inflation Targeting and Output Stabilization in an Estimated Monetary Model. Journal of Economics and Business, 132, 106209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconbus.2024.106209

The Financial Decelerator Channel https://ssrn.com/abstract_id=4558560

Goren, A. (2021). Financial Efficiency and the Lucas Puzzle. Journal of Accounting and Finance, 21(4). https://doi.org/10.33423/jaf.v21i4.4533

All papers: SSRN author page https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=4529454