Introducing default and limited collateral into general equilibrium allows for a theoery of endogenous contracts, ..

In spite of fiat money is useless in a standard Arrow-Debreu model, in this paper we will show that this does not hold true anymore when goods are indivisible. In our setting, although fiat money yields no utility, its price will always be positive and the set of equilibrium allocations changes...

Does the Pareto criterion discriminate among policy choices when the policymaker does not know the correct model of the economy? If the policymaker can specify ex ante preferences for each agent, there will typically be some policy change that improves the welfare of each agent relative to a...

Skill-biased technical change is usually interpreted in terms of the efficiency parameters of skilled and unskilled labor. This implies that the relative productivity of skilled workers changes proportionally in all tasks. In contrast, we argue that technical changes also affect the curvature of...

Many people are fired from their jobs for poor performance. However, it is difficult to distinguish whether they are fired because they are not well suited for their job (sorting explanation) or because the firms are trying to provide incentives for effort (incentive explanation). This paper...

We analyze a search model of the labor market in which firms and workers meet bilaterally and negotiate over wages in the presence of private information. We show that a fall in labor market frictions induces more aggressive wage bargaining behavior which in turn leads to a costly increase in...

This paper investigates the interaction between education decisions by workers and investment decisions by firms in a random matching model with endogenous heterogeneity. I analyze the efficiency properties of the equilibrium and find that in the presence of search frictions and investment costs...

I develop a matching model with heterogeneous workers, firms, and worker-firm matches, and apply it to longitudinal linked data on employers and employees. Workers vary in their marginal product when employed and their value of leisure when unemployed. Firms vary in their marginal product and...

We develop a model in which firms set their salary levels before matching with workers. Wages fall relative to any competitive equilibrium while profits rise almost as much, implying little inefficiency. Furthermore, the best firms gain the most from the system while wages become compressed. We...

We examine an economy in which the cost of consuming some goods can be reduced by making commitments to consumption levels that do not vary across states. For example, moral hazard and matching considerations may make it cheaper to produce housing services via owner-occupied than rented housing,...