We provide a theory of the determination of exchange rates based on capital flows in imperfect financial markets. Capital flows drive exchange rates by altering the balance sheets of financiers that bear the risks resulting from international imbalances in the demand for financial assets. Such...

This paper proposes a way to model boundedly rational dynamic programming in a parsimonious and tractable way. It first illustrates the approach via a boundedly rational version of the consumption-saving life cycle problem. The consumer can pay attention to the variables such as the interest...

We use data from prospectus supplements to create measures of the complexity of securitized products. We use these measures to investigate whether and to what extent complexity plays a role in the performance and pricing of mortgage-backed securities. We find that securities in more complex...

This paper studies optimal dynamic tax policy under the threat of political reform. A policy will be reformed ex post if a large enough political coalition supports reform; thus, credible policies are those that will continue to attract enough political support in the future. If the reform...

We quantify how much nonfundamental movements in stock prices affect firm decisions. We estimate a dynamic investment model in which firms can finance with equity, cash, or debt. Misvaluation affects equity values, and firms optimally issue and repurchase overvalued and undervalued shares. The...

This paper analyzes the barriers to occupational mobility using a theoretical framework that parallels that of the gravity models commonly estimated in the trade literature. The model provides an equation linking flows of workers across occupation pairs to a set of source and destination...

We investigate the trade-off between the risk-sharing gains enjoyed by more interconnected firms and the costs resulting from an increased risk exposure. We find that when the shock distribution displays "fat" tails, extreme segmentation into small components is optimal, while minimal...

What factors impact how much consumers repay on their credit cards each month? This paper examines the drivers of payment behavior using the CFPB credit card database, which includes the monthly account activity of a large fraction of U.S. consumers from 2008-2012. We find that consumers'...

We study a model where customers face frictions when changing their supplier, generating sluggishness in the firm's customer base. Firms care about expanding their customer base and this affects their pricing strategy. We characterize optimal pricing in this model and estimate it using data on...

We study a class of continuous time heterogeneous agent models with idiosyncratic shocks and incomplete markets. This class can be boiled down to a system of two coupled partial differential equations: a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation and a Kolmogorov Forward equation, a system that Lasry and...