Better informed consumers may be treated preferentially by firms since their consumption serves as a quality signal for other customers. For normal goods this results in wealthy individuals being treated better than poor individuals. We investigate this phenomenon in an equilibrium model of...

We study the effects of inflation in models with various trading frictions. The framework is related to recent search-based monetary theory, in that trade takes place periodically in centralized and decentralized markets, but we consider three alternative mechanisms for price formation:...

Taller workers receive a wage premium, and the disparity in wages is similar in magnitude to the race and gender gaps. We exploit the variation in an individual’s height over time to explore the ways in which height affects wages. Specifically, we show that for white males the effect of adult...

Consider two agents who learn the value of an unknown parameter by observing a sequence of private signals. The signals are independent and identically distributed across time but not necessarily across agents. We show that that when each agent's signal space is finite, the agents will commonly...

There is much discussion of the relationships between crime, inequality, and unemployment. We construct a model where all three are endogenous. We find that introducing crime into otherwise standard models of labor markets has several interesting implications. For example, it can lead to wage...

We analyze labor market models where the law of one price does not hold; i.e., models with equilibrium wage dispersion. We begin assuming workers are ex ante heterogeneous, and highlight a flaw with this approach: if search is costly, the market shuts down. We then assume workers are homogeneous...

I study how choice behavior given unawareness of an event differs from choice behavior given subjective belief of zero probability on that event. Depending on different types of unawareness the decision-maker suffers, behavior under unawareness is either incomparable with that under zero...

We argue for incorporating the financial economics of market microstructure into the financial econometrics of asset return volatility estimation. In particular, we use market microstructure theory to derive the cross-correlation function between latent returns and market microstructure noise,...

We develop a model of monetary exchange that avoids several common criticisms of the recent microfoundations literature. First, rather than random matching, we assume that buyers know the location of all sellers, and hence the process of finding a partner is deterministic, although trade is...

We compare three pricing mechanisms for monetary economies: bargaining (search equilibrium); price taking (competitive equilibrium); and price posting (competitive search equilibrium). We do this in a framework that, in addition to considering different mechanisms, extends existing work on the...