In this paper we aim to trace the roots of the ongoing economic mayhem and to unmask the chorus of the tragedy which plays on the world stage. The main thesis of our work is that, despite the triumphant rhetoric praising the merits of perfect competition, the global fields of the dysfunctional...

"The goal of scientific work is to understand more and more by less and less. In this effort, theoretical unification plays a large part. There are two main types of theoretical unification -- unification of different theories of the same field of phenomena and unification of theories of...

We use matched employer-employee data and firm balance sheet data to investigate the importance of firm productivity and firm labor market power in explaining firm heterogeneity in wage formation. We use a linear regression model with one interacted high dimensional fixed effect to estimate...

We propose a novel structural method to empirically identify economies of scale in household consumption. We assume collective households with consumption technologies that define the public and private nature of expenditures through Barten scales. Our method recovers the technology by solely...

The Global Crisis demonstrated to the world that Ratings Agencies had misled the public about the stability of financial institutions. The Finance literature had decided that it was impossible to have bubbles in financial markets and any surge in the stock market would be self-correcting. Recent...

We show that the main nonparametric identification finding of Abbring and Van den Berg (2003b, Econometrica) for the effect of a timing-chosen treatment on an event duration of interest does not hold. The main problem is that the identification is based on the competing-risks identification...

In their IZA Discussion Paper 10247, Johansson and Lee claim that the main result (Proposition 3) in Abbring and Van den Berg (2003b) does not hold. We show that their claim is incorrect. At a certain point within their line of reasoning, they make a rather basic error while transforming one...

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to explore individuals' motivations for redistribution. The laboratory results show that as income uncertainty diminishes, participants become more extreme in their preferences for redistribution. The findings suggest that for most people, the motivation...

Recent validation studies show that survey misreporting is pervasive and biases common analyses. Addressing this problem is further complicated, because validation data are usually convenience samples and access is restricted, making them more suitable to document than to solve the problem. I...

Estimates of Frisch labor-supply elasticities are biased in the presence of borrowing constraints. We show that this estimation bias is less pronounced for secondary than for primary earners. The reason is that, in households with two earners and joint borrowing constraints, wage-rate...