Larger cities typically give rise to two opposite effects: tougher competition among firms and higher production costs. Using an urban model with substitutability of production factors and pro-competitive effects, I study the response of the market outcome to city size, land-use regulations, and...

We examine the effect of a large-scale administrative reorganization in China, where counties are annexed into cities to accommodate urban growth. We present a simple model to illustrate how this annexation may affect firm entry decisions and in turn land market outcomes. Using nationwide data...

This paper studies the relevance of cognitive uncertainty – subjective uncertainty over one’s utility-maximizing action – for understanding and predicting intertemporal choice. The main idea is that when people are cognitively noisy, such as when a decision is complex, they implicitly...

Employing an endogenous growth model with human capital, this paper explores how productivity shocks in the goods and human capital producing sectors contribute to explaining aggregate fluctuations in output, consumption, investment and hours. Given the importance of accounting for both the...

Epidemiological models assume gravity-like interactions of individuals across space without microfoundations. We combine a simple epidemiological frame-work with a dynamic model of individual location choice. The model predicts that flows of people across space obey a structural gravity...

This paper provides a critical review of models of the spread of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that have been influential in recent policy discussions. It notes potentially important features of the real- world environment that the standard models do not incorporate and discusses reasons why...

Recruitment behavior is important for the matching process in the labor market. Using unique linked survey-administrative data, we explore the relationships between hiring and recruitment policies. Faster hiring goes along with higher search effort, lower hiring standards and more generous...

Using a registered pre-analysis plan, we survey college students during California’s Stay-at-Home order to test whether compliance with social distancing requirements depends on key parameters that affect their marginal benefit from doing so. We find a quarter of students violated the...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model extended to include heterogeneous expectations, to revisit the evidence that postwar US macroeconomic data can be explained as the outcome of passive monetary policy, indeterminacy, and sunspot-driven fluctuations in the pre-1979 sample, with a switch...

One of the most important controversies in health economics concerns the question whether the imminent aging of the population in most OECD countries will place an additional burden on the tax payers who finance public health care systems. Proponents of the "red-herring hypothesis" argue that...