We argue that the large and growing North-South trade imbalances arisen over the last three decades may have exacerbated wage inequality worldwide. In particular, we show that in a standard Heckscher-Ohlin setup with a continuum of goods, a Southern trade surplus is associated with higher skill...

The rate of long-term unemployment spiked during the Great Recession. To help explain this, I exploit the systematic and counter-cyclical differences in unemployment duration across occupations. This heterogeneity extends the tail of the unemployment duration distribution, which is necessary to...

Data on the world saving distribution reveals three key features: (i) saving rates are significantly different across countries and they remain different for long periods of time; (ii) the average saving rate has remained relatively unchanged but the dispersion in saving rates has risen; and...

This paper examines the relationship between sovereign bond spreads, local economic activity, and global financial risk. We use secondary-market prices of dollar-denominated sovereign securities to construct yield spreads between sovereign bond yields and yields on the appropriately defined...

We built a unique dataset of 300,000 famous people born between Hammurabi's epoch and 1879, Einstein's birth year. It includes, among other variables, the vital dates, occupations, and locations of celebrities from the Index Bio-bibliographicus Notorum Hominum (IBN), a very comprehensive...

I study a principal-agent problem in which the principal can obtain additional costly information about the agent's effort. I analyze this problem in the context of optimal unemployment insurance a la Hopenhayn and Nicolini (1997), where job-search effort is private information. I calibrate the...

We develop an heterogeneous agent model of consumption and health choices in order to estimate the effect of heath status in the marginal utility of consumption. We use micro data from the HRS, PSID, and CEX to identify the parameters of interest from the observed consumption growth for...

When trade is costly within countries, international trade leads to concentration of economic activity in locations with good access to foreign markets. Costly trade within countries also makes it hard for remote locations to gain from international trade. We investigate the role of these forces...

This paper adds imitation by incumbent firms, and not just by new entrants, to the model of selection and growth developed in Luttmer [2007]. Noisy firm-level innovation and imitation give rise to a long-run growth rate that exceeds the average rate at which individual firms innovate. It can be...

We develop a model of technological progress and knowledge transmission in the Malthusian era. Given low literacy rates, codified knowledge and formal education were much less important than today. Instead, most knowledge was directly acquired from elders. In knowledge-intensive areas, this...