We consider a dual labor market with a frictional formal sector and a competitive informal sector. We show that the size of the informal sector is generally too large compared to the optimal allocation of the workers. It follows that our results give a rationale to informality-reducing policies.

Employing a vignette experiment, we test the empirical importance of key attitudes underlying the models of taste-based and statistical discrimination in explaining ethnic hiring discrimination. We find that employer concern that co-workers and customers prefer collaborating with natives drives...

This paper examines the Turkish wage curve using individual data from the Household Labor Force Survey including 26 NUTS-2 regions over the period 2005–2008. We find an unemployment elasticity of −0.099, with a higher elasticity for younger, less educated, less experienced and female workers.

Prices that end with 9, also known as psychological price points, are common, comprising about 70% of the retail prices. They are also more rigid than other prices. We take advantage of a natural experiment to document an emergence of a new price ending that has the same effects as 9-endings. In...

We use micro level retail price data from convenience stores to study the link between 0-ending price points and price rigidity during a period of a runaway inflation, when the annual inflation rate was in the range of 60%–430%. Surprisingly, we find that more round prices are less likely to...

We investigate the role of sticky wages in accounting for real exchange rate dynamics. Unlike the sticky price economy, government spending shocks play a more important role than technology shocks in explaining the hump-shaped impulse responses of real exchange rates.

Central banks face uncertainty about potential output. We model optimal monetary policy under discretion in a situation in which the central bank adopts a min–max approach to policy. The case for appointing a conservative central banker who puts a larger weight on inflation stabilization...

A landmark result in the optimal monetary policy design literature is that fundamental-based interest rate rules invariably lead to rational expectations equilibria (REE) that are not stable under adaptive learning. In this paper, we make a novel information assumption that private agents cannot...

We decompose the effect of distance on intercity retail price dispersion in US into transport and non-transport cost components. We find that distance contains more information than transport costs. Care should be taken in interpreting distance effect as transport costs only.

In this paper, we consider a model where producers set their prices based on their prediction of the aggregated price level and an exogenous variable, which can be a demand or a cost-push shock. To form their expectations, they use OLS-type econometric learning with bounded memory. We show that...