This paper develops a new theory of long term unsecured credit contracts based on costly contracting that matches the data in a variety of dimensions. Credit lines are long term relations between lending firms and households that pre-specify a credit limit and interest rate in each period....

This paper studies properties of economies with complete markets where there is positive default on consumer debt. Households can default partially, at a punishment cost, and intermediaries price this risk competitively. This en- vironment yields only partial insurance. The risk-based pricing of...

Asset price data imply a large degree international risk sharing, while aggregate consumption data do not. We evaluate how well a model with fixed costs of exchanging money for assets can account for this discrepancy. In our model, households receive idiosyncratic income shocks, and only a...

We show that the key identifying assumptions underlying the existing approaches to identifying technology shocks in the data are violated in models with heterogeneous capital and labor. We propose a new method to identifying technology shocks in the data in presence of factor heterogeneity and...

We analyze the effects of the observed increased share of delegated capital for trading strategies and equilibrium prices. We introduce delegation into a standard Lucas exchange economy, where in equilibrium some investors trade on their own account, but others decide to delegate trading to...

We propose a way to measure the contribution of search frictions to the level of wage dispersion observed in the data. Using the data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth we find that the variance of match qualities between workers and employers accounts for about 6%...

We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the...

This paper develops a vintage-technology model, in which firms face idiosyncratic uncertainties in nonconvex technology adoption costs. We derive the generalized (S, s) adoption rule yielding the lumpy technology adoption behavior within an otherwise standard model and compute the stationary...

Capital equipment, such as computers and industrial machinery, embodies skill-biased technology and, hence, is complementary to skilled labor. Many countries, by importing a large share of their capital, import skill-biased technology and a rise in the skill premium. In this paper we develop a...

We estimate and report life cycle transition probabilities between employment, unemployment and inactivity for male workers using Current Population Survey monthly files. We assess the relative importance of each probability in explaining the life cycle profiles of participation and unemployment...