This paper studies quarterly employment flows of approximately 10,000 large U.S. manufacturing establishments during 1972:1-1980:4.After estimating the extent of short run microeconomic substitution between employment and hours per worker (hours-week), we construct measures of the path of the...

Infrastructure concessions are frequently renegotiated after investments are sunk, resulting in better contractual terms for the franchise holders. This paper offers a political economy explanation for renegotiations that occur with no apparent holdup. We argue that they are used by political...

What is the relation between infrequent price adjustment and the dynamic response of the aggregate price level to monetary shocks? The answer to this question ranges from a one-to-one link (Calvo, 1983) to no connection whatsoever (Caplin and Spulber, 1987). The purpose of this paper is to...

The sensitivity of U.S. aggregate investment to shocks is procyclical: the initial response increases by approximately 50% from the trough to the peak of the business cycle. This feature of the data follows naturally from a DSGE model with lumpy microeconomic capital adjustment. Beyond...

This paper quantifies the direct impact of taxes on income distribution at the household level in Chile and estimates the distributional effect of several changes in the tax structure. We find that income distributions before and after taxes are very similar (Gini coefficients of 0.448 and...

In recent years several countries have started massive highway franchising programs auctioned to private firms. In these auctions, the regulator typically sets the franchise term and firms bid on tolls, or, alternatively, the regulator sets tolls and the winner is the firm that asks for the...

This paper is an attempt to enrich the characterization of the sluggish behavior of the aggregate price level. Our contribution to this vast literature is to explicitly consider microeconomic heterogeneity and its interaction with nonlinear microeconomic price adjustment policies. The model we...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) cannot be justified because they free public funds. When PPPs are justified on efficiency grounds, the contract that optimally balances demand risk, user-fee distortions and the opportunity cost of public funds, features a minimum revenue guarantee and a...

When firms face menu costs, the relation between their output and money is highly nonlinear. At the aggregate level, however, this needs not be so. In this paper we study the dynamic behavior of a general equilibrium menu-cost economy where firms are heterogeneous in the shocks they perceive,...

It has become increasingly common to allocate highway franchises to the bidder that offers to charge the lowest toll. Often, building a highway increases the value of land held by a small group of developers, an effect that is more pronounced with lower tolls. We study the welfare implications...