Discretionary policymaking can foster strategic complementarities between private sector decisions, thus leading to multiple equilibria. This article studies a simple example, originating with Kydland and Prescott, of a government which must decide whether to build a dam to prevent adverse...

Social distancing via shelter-in-place strategies, and wearing masks, have emerged as the most effective non-pharmaceutical ways of combatting COVID-19. In the United States, choices about these policies are made by individual states. We develop a game-theoretic model and then test it...

We propose an easy-to-use search friction in the goods markets in medium-sized New Keynesian models. This friction allows increases in measured productivity in response to increases in expenditures via higher search effort from households. As a result markups can become procyclical and labor...

As search frictions become smaller in the market for a consumer product, buyers are able to locate and access more sellers per unit of time. In response, sellers choose to design varieties of the product that are more specialized in order to exploit differences in the buyers' preferences. I find...

We explore the impact of wage offers on job applications, testing implications of the directed search model and trying to distinguish it from random search. We use a field experiment conducted on a Chinese job board, with real jobs for which we randomly varied the wage offers across three...

We study a model of retrospective search in which an agent--a researcher, an online shopper, or a politician--tracks the value of a product. Discoveries beget discoveries and their observations are correlated over time, which we model using a Brownian motion. The agent, a standard exponential...

We study a model of collective search by teams. Discoveries beget discoveries and correlated search results are governed by a Brownian path. Search results' variation at any point---the search scope---is jointly controlled. Agents individually choose when to cease search and implement their best...

I study a search equilibrium model of the labor market in which workers have stubborn beliefs about their labor market prospects, i.e. beliefs about their probability of finding a job and the wage they will earn that do not respond to aggregate fluctuations in fundamentals. I show that, when...

We develop a dynamic model of international business-to-business transactions in which sellers and buyers search for each other, with the probability of a match depending on both individual and aggregate search effort. Fit to customs records on U.S. apparel imports, the model captures key...

We consider a version of the imperfect competition model of Butters (1977), Varian (1980) and Burdett and Judd (1983) in which sellers make an ex-ante investment in the quality of their variety of the product. Equilibrium exists, is unique and is efficient. In equilibrium, search frictions not...