Studying the incentives and constraints in the non-market sector — that is, home production — enhances our understanding of economic behavior in the market. In particular, it helps us to understand (1) small variations of labor supply over the life cycle, (2) large variations of employment...

Whether technological progress raises or lowers aggregate employment in the short run has been the subject of much debate in recent years. Using a simple model of industry employment, we show that cross-industry differences of inventory holding costs, demand elasticities, and price rigidities...

We find that technology's effect on employment varies greatly across manufacturing industries. Some industries exhibit a temporary reduction in employment in response to a permanent increase in TFP, whereas far more industries exhibit an employment increase in response to a permanent TFP shock....

Recently, Galí and others have found that technological progress may be contractionary: a favorable technology shock reduces hours worked in the short run. We ask whether this observation is robust in disaggregate data. According to our VAR analysis of 458 four-digit U.S. manufacturing...

We investigate the mapping from individual to aggregate labor supply using a general equilibrium heterogeneous-agent model with an incomplete market. The nature of heterogeneity among workers is calibrated using wage data from the PSID. The gross worker flows between employment and nonemployment...

We propose a new VAR identification scheme that distinguishes shifts of and movements along the labor demand schedule to identify labor-supply shocks. According to our VAR analysis of post-war U.S. data, labor-supply shifts account for about 30 percent of the variation in hours and about 15...

The cyclical behavior of hours of work, wages, and consumption does not conform with the prediction of the representative agent with standard preferences. The residual in the intra-temporal first-order condition for commodity consumption and leisure is often viewed as a failure of labor-market...

Many successful examples of economic development, such as South Korea, exhibit long periods of sustained capital accumulation. This process is characterized by a gradually rising investment rate along with a moderate rate of return to capital, both of which are strongly at odds with the standard...

In booms, households substitute luxuries for necessities, e.g., food away from home for food at home. Ignoring this cyclical pattern of composition changes in the consumption basket makes the labor-market wedge -- a measure of inefficiency that reflects the gap between the marginal rate of...

The standard theory of household-portfolio choice is hard to reconcile with the following facts: (i) Households hold a small amount of equity despite the higher average rate of return. (ii) The share of risky assets increases with the age of the household. (iii) The share of risky assets is...