We explore the accumulation of assets in the presence of limited insurance against idiosyncratic shocks, borrowing constraints and endogenous labor productivity due to the so-called "nutrition curve". We show that in such an environment, any stationary equilibrium is characterized by a polarized...

Through marriage, individuals can share some risks that would otherwise be uninsurable. In this paper, we ask how much idiosyncratic income risk can be diversified away through marriage contracts alone versus how much risk there remains for public unemployment insurance programs to alleviate. We...

Rural-urban migration has long been associated with economic development and growth in the economic literature. In particular, Todaro and Harris-Todaro-type probabilistic models that examine migration have concentrated on the expected wage disparities between rural and urban (formal) labor...

Competitive public and private institutions of higher education in the U.S. take race into consideration in admissions and decisions about financial aid when able to do so. In public universities in states that have proscribed use of race, substitute policies, intended to promote minority...

We examine the possibility of a Pareto-improving pay-as-you-go social security system, using an ex-ante welfare criterion. Our objective is to identify the conditions under which a suitably designed pay-as-you-go social security system is welfare improving, when markets are complete and...

In this paper we present circumstances under which the possibility of high leverage can lead to widespread default and national crises. In models with incomplete markets, default and production, there will almost always be a mismatch between firm output across states of nature and asset...