We analyze how the presence of endogenous preferences affects the altruistic bequest motive from parents to children. We will show that the existence of habits raises the threshold value of the intergenerational discount factor above which altruistic bequests are positive, while aspiration...

We study how the introduction of consumption externalities affects the efficiency of the dynamic equilibrium in an economy displaying dynastic altruism. When the bequest motive is inoperative consumption externalities affect the intertemporal margin between young and old consumption and thus...

In this paper, we characterize the relationship between the initial distribution of human capital and physical inheritances among individuals and the long-run distribution of these two variables. In a model with indivisible investment in education, we analyze how the initial distribution of...

Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being bigger for non-college educated individuals versus college educated ones. Divorce has increased, more so for the non-college educated. Additionally, positive assortative mating has risen. Income inequality among households has also widened. A...

This paper explores the combined effects of reductions in trade frictions, tariffs, and firing costs on firm dynamics, job turnover, and wage distributions. It uses establishment-level data from Colombia to estimate an open economy dynamic model that links trade to job flows in a new way. The...

The matching function - a key building block in models of labor market frictions - implies that the job finding rate depends only on labor market tightness. We estimate such a matching function and …find that the relation, although remarkably stable over 1967-2007, broke down spectacularly...

We study the extent of macroeconomic convergence/divergence among euro area countries. Our analysis focuses on four variables (unemployment, inflation, relative prices and the current account), and seeks to uncover the role played by monetary union as a convergence factor by using non-euro...

This paper points out an empirical puzzle that arises when an RBC economy with a job matching function is used to model unemployment. The standard model can generate sufficiently large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment, or a sufficiently small response of unemployment to labor market...

The US labor market witnessed two apparently unrelated secular movements in the last 30 years: a decline in unemployment between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, and a decline in participation since the early 2000s. Using CPS micro data and a stock- ow accounting framework, we show that a...

We study the equilibrium determinants of firm-level heterogeneity in a model in which firms can choose between different probability distributions when drawing productivity at the entry stage and explore the implications in closed and open economy. One novel result is that export opportunities,...