Sub-Saharan Africa has a high incidence of polygyny. It is also the poorest region of the world. In this paper I ask whether banning polygyny could play any role for development. Using a quantitative model of polygyny, I find that enforcing monogamy lowers fertility, shrinks the spousal age gap,...

This paper develops a model of a monetary economy in which individual firms are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks as well as general inflation. Sellers can change price only by incurring a real “menu cost.†We calibrate this cost and the variance and autocorrelation of the...

We analyze an implementation of an optimal disability insurance system as a competitive equilibrium with taxes. An optimum is implemented by an asset-tested disability system in which a disability transfer is paid only if an agent has assets below a specified maximum. The logic behind this...

This paper studies the optimal redistribution of income inequality caused by the presence of search and matching frictions in the labor market. We study this problem in the context of a directed search model of the labor market populated by homogeneous workers and heterogeneous firms. The...