The literature assessing whether mutual fund managers have skill typically regards skill as an immutable attribute of the manager or the fund. We show that many measures of skill, such as returns, alphas, and measures of stock-picking and market-timing, appear to vary over the business cycle. We...

The network model also explains why societies with a high prevalence of contagious disease might evolve toward growth-inhibiting social institutions and how small initial differences can produce large divergence in incomes. Empirical work uses differences in the prevalence of diseases spread by...

The positive link between international trade and productivity is well established. However, research on magnitude and consequences of internal trade barriers, which inhibit the efficient geographic distribution of production within a country, is limited. Unique data from Canada and China...

Can a union of sovereign nations efficiently implement fiscal projects, even when members are purely self-interested? We construct a model where forming a union can be beneficial for all members, even though some nations are net contributors to the union budget. In our model, joining the union...

This paper builds and estimates a quantitative model of business cycle fluctuations and asset premia driven by changes in uncertainty.

We show that the Carry Trade exploits a static interest rate differential which is largely unrelated to the fact that currencies whose interest rates exceed their long-run average tend to appreciate (the Forward Premium Puzzle). The evidence is consistent with the presence of a static risk...

There are large and persistent productivity differences across firms within narrowly defined industries. This is especially true in poor countries. Why do productivity differences decline as the economy develops? In this paper I propose a theory where productivity differences exist because...

Standard spatial models of candidate competition suggest that better information about the location of the median voter produce policies closer to the median voter’s ideal point. In this paper we show that more precise information about voter preferences may produce counterintuitive...

This paper measures mismatch between job-seekers and vacancies in the U.S. labor market. Mismatch is defined as the distance between the observed allocation of unemployed workers across sectors and the optimal allocation that solves a planner’s problem. The planner’s allocation...

Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very dierently. The education gender gap was eliminated and married...