In this paper, we attempt to understand the determinants of mobility by introducing the concept of local social capital. Investing in local ties is rational when workers anticipate that they will not move to another region. Reciprocally, once local social capital is accumulated, incentives to...

In order to credibly "sell" legitimate children to their spouse, women must forego more attractive mating opportunities. This paper derives the implications of this observation for the pattern of matching in marriage markets, the dynamics of human capital accumulation, and the evolution of the...

Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting...

A search model of the labor market is augmented to include commuting time to work. The theory posits that wages are positively related to commute distance, by a factor itself depending negatively on the bargaining power of workers. Since not all combinations of distance and wages are accepted,...

Wage determination under asymmetric information generates inefficiencies due to excess turnover. Severance pay and layoff taxes can improve efficiency. We show that inefficient separations can even be fully removed with fixed separation taxes in the case where the relevant private information is...

Building a model with three imperfect markets - goods, labor and credit - representing a product's life-cycle, we find that goods market frictions drastically change the qualitative and quantitative dynamics of labor market variables. The calibrated model leads to a significant reduction in the...

Unemployment may depend on equilibrium in other markets than the labor markets. This paper adresses this old idea by introducing search frictions on several markets: in a model of credit and labor market imperfections as in Wasmer and Weil (2004), I further introduce search on the goods market....

This paper studies a model of the distribution of income under bounded needs. Utility derived from any given good reaches a bliss point at a finite consumption level of that good. On the other hand, introducing new varieties always increases utility. It is assumed that each variety is owned by a...

I study a model where Information Technology, while typically increasing overall inequality, is likely to harm some people at intermediate and high levels of the distribution of income but to benefit people at the bottom. Within a given occupation it may harm some workers while benefitting...

In search of a macroeconomic theory of wage determination, the agnostic reader should be puzzled by the apparent contradiction between two influential theories. On one hand, in the standard search-matching theory with wage bargaining, hiring cost and constant returns of labor, the bargaining...