The two main trends in gender differentials in the last decade suggest an apparently contradictory picture: women still experience a significant negative differential in wages but not in education, where they moved from a negative to a positive differential. We propose and estimate a model where...

Gender wage differentials, conditional on observed productivity characteristics, have been considered a possible indication of prejudice against women in the labor market. However, there is no conclusive evidence on whether these differentials are due to labor market discrimination or to...

If borrowing capacity of indebted households is tied to the value of their home, house prices should enter a correctly specified aggregate Euler equation for consumption. I develop a simple two-agent, dynamic general equilibrium model in which home (collateral) values affect debt capacity and...

This paper estimates the effects of technology shocks in Bayesian VAR models of the United States, Japan and West Germany, imposing restrictions on the sign of impulse responses. These restrictions are motivated with explicit priors on the parameters of a dynamic general equilibrium model...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay to buy a risky security. We relate this measure to consumers' endowment and attributes and to measures of background risk and liquidity constraints. We...

Abstract: Focusing on observable default risk's role in loan terms and the subsequent consequences for household behavior, this paper shows that lenders increasingly used risk-based pricing of interest rates in consumer loan markets during the mid-1990s. It tests three resulting predictions....

Saving rates have fallen steadily in the U.S. since the 1970s. The literature has proposed numerous possible explanations for the decrease including increases in governmental insurance, changes in the distribution of income, and increases in annuitized wealth. Analysis of all three explanations...

The purpose of the paper is to study the effects of labor market policies on the equilibrium rate of growth in the Grossman-Helpman model. For that purpose, the version of the their model developed by Klette and Kortum to explain the distribution of firm size is extended to allow for both...