We examine integration strategies of multinational firms that face a rich array of choices of international organization. Each firm in an industry must provide headquarter services from its home country, produce intermediate inputs, and assemble the intermediate goods into final products. Both...

Many households devote a large fraction of their budgets to "consumption commitments" -- goods that involve transaction costs and are infrequently adjusted. This paper characterizes risk preferences in an expected utility model with commitments. We show that commitments affect risk preferences...

We develop a model of informal risk-sharing in social networks, where relationships between individuals can be used as social collateral to enforce insurance payments. We characterize incentive compatible risk-sharing arrangements and obtain two results. (1) The degree of informal insurance is...

This paper builds a theory of informal contract enforcement in social networks. In our model, relationships between individuals generate social collateral that can be used to control moral hazard when agents interact in a borrowing relationship. We define trust between two agents as the maximum...

We analyze the implications of household-level adjustment costs for the dynamics of aggregate consumption. We show that an economy in which agents have "consumption commitments" is approximately equivalent to a habit formation model in which the habit stock is a weighted average of past...

Economic theory predicts that home ownership should have a negative effect on risk-taking in financial portfolios. However, empirical work has not found a strong relationship between housing and portfolios. We identify two reasons for the divergence between the theory and data. First, it is...

We seed noisy information to members of a real-world social network to study how information diffusion and information aggregation jointly shape social learning. Our environment features substantial social learning. We show that learning occurs via diffusion which is highly imperfect: signals...

We introduce firm and worker heterogeneity into a model of innovation-driven endogenous growth. Individuals who differ in ability sort into either a research sector or a manufacturing sector that produces differentiated goods. Each research project generates a new variety of the differentiated...

In this paper, we examine one channel through which the trade regime might affect growth in the long run. We model endogenous technological progress that results from profit maximizing investments by far-sighted entrepreneurs. Productivity in the research lab depends upon the "stock of knowledge...

Price controls were part of Israel's stabilization program of July 1985. Some results of the program seem to be inconsistent with competitive macroeconomic models. It is suggested that these results are consistent with an economy that has an oligopolistic market structure. The paper explores the...