We discuss the past, present and future of the structural approach in empirical microeconomics, starting with its inception in the 1970s and 1980s. Our focus is on the use of the structural approach in labor economics, broadly defined to include population economics, human capital and related...

A growing literature uses now widely-available data on beliefs and expectations in the estimation of structural models. In this chapter, we review this literature, with an emphasis on models of individual and household behavior. We first show how expectations data have been used to relax strong...

We document that declining hours worked are the primary driver of widening inequality in the bottom half of the male labor earnings distribution in the United States over the past 52 years. This decline in hours is heavily concentrated in recessions: hours and earnings at the bottom fall sharply...

This paper reviews and generalizes the sufficient statistics approach to policy evaluation. The idea of the approach is that the welfare effect of policy changes can be expressed in terms estimable reduced-form elasticities, allowing for policy evaluation without estimating the structural...

This paper examines how employer- and worker-specific productivity shocks transmit to earnings and employment in an economy with search frictions and firm commitment. We develop an equilibrium search model with worker and firm shocks and characterize the optimal contract offered by competing...

This paper studies competing sources of declining dynamism. Evidence shows that an important component of this decline is accounted for by the reduction in the response of employment to shocks in US establishments. Using a plant level dynamic optimization problem as a framework for analysis,...

The traditional model of bank-led financial intermediation, where banks issue demandable deposits to savers and make informationally sensitive loans to borrowers, has seen a dramatic decline since 1970s. Instead, private credit is increasingly intermediated through arms-length transactions, such...

We study the causal interpretation of instrumental variables (IV) estimands of nonlinear, multivariate structural models with respect to rich forms of model misspecification. We focus on guaranteeing that the researcher's estimator is sharp zero consistent, meaning that the researcher concludes...

We find that central bank reserves injected by QE crowd out bank lending. We estimate a structural model with cross-sectional instrumental variables for deposit and loan demand. Our results are determined by the elasticity of loan demand and the impact of reserve holdings on the cost of...

We measure the nature and severity of a variety of belief distortions in market reactions to hundreds of economic news events using a new methodology that synthesizes estimation of a structural asset pricing model with algorithmic machine learning to quantify bias. We estimate that investors...