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...

We explore the optimal progressivity of the income tax system in an incomplete-markets model. Agents value private and public consumption and leisure, and are heterogeneous with respect to innate ability, idiosyncratic shock histories, and preferences. This heterogeneity generates a potential...

This paper studies how recessions affect individual income risk. We employ a unique and confidential administrative data set with tens of millions of observations on individual earnings histories from the Social Security Administration records. We use a dataset that is a 10% random sample of the...

This paper investigates the role of education in the evolution of women's role in the society---specifically, in the labor market and in the marriage market. In particular, it attempts to understand a set of socio-economic trends since the 1950s, such as (i) the falling marriage rate and the...