Reverse mortgages allow elderly homeowners with limited income or financial wealth to borrow against their housing wealth without downsizing or selling out and becoming a renter. Although the proportion of elderly homeowners using reverse mortgages has been increasing rapidly, only 1.4 percent...

We study models of credit with limited commitment, which implies endogenous borrowing constraints. We show that there are multiple stationary equilibria, as well as nonstationary equilibria, including some that display deterministic cyclic and chaotic dynamics. There are also stochastic...

We study economies with an essential role for liquid assets in transactions. The model can generate multiple stationary equilibria, across which asset prices, market participation, capitalization, output and welfare are positively related. It can also generate a variety of nonstationary...

We study bilateral exchange, both direct trade, and indirect trade that happens through chains of intermediaries, or middlemen. We develop a model of this activity and present a sequence of applications. We illustrate how, and how many, intermediaries get involved, and how the terms of trade are...

We present a tractable equilibrium job search model of individual worker careers allowing for human capital accumulation, employer heterogeneity and individual-level shocks. We estimate our structural model on a panel of Danish matched employer-employee data and use it to analyze the...

How does a fall in house prices a¤ect real activity? This paper presents a business cycle model in which a decline in house prices reduces geographical mobility, creating distortions in the labor market. This happens because homeowners face declines in their home equity levels, after which it...

We investigate the theoretical relationship between trade policy and growth. We use simple versions of some of the most common international trade models to investigate a number of specific mechanisms by which trade liberalization is thought to enhance growth or productivity: improvements in the...

We develop a framework for studying trade in vertically and horizontally and differentiated products. In our model, consumers have heterogeneous incomes and heterogeneous tastes. They purchase a homogeneous good as well as making a discrete choice of quality and variety of a differentiated...

In order to understand the relationship between homeownership and unemployment the we extend the model in Rendon (2006) that studies the relation between asset accumulation and job search to include the link between homeownership and asset accumulation. We establish the connection between...

More advanced technologies demand higher degrees of specialization – and longer chains of production connecting raw inputs to final outputs. Longer production chains are subject to a “weakest link” effect: they are more fragile and more prone to failure. Optimal chain length is determined...