Under the assumption that individuals know the conditional distributions of signals given the payoff-relevant parameters, existing results conclude that as individuals observe infinitely many signals, their beliefs about the parameters will eventually merge. We first show that these results are...

Most economic analyses presume that there are limited differences in the prior beliefs of individuals, an assumption most often justified by the argument that sufficient common experiences and observations will eliminate disagreements. We investigate this claim using a simple model of Bayesian...

Following on Keynes's Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, this paper develops conjectures about the world we will leave to our grandchildren. It starts by outlining the 10 most important trends that have defined our economic, social, and political lives over the last 100 years. It then...

We consider infinite horizon economies populated by a continuum of agents who are subject to idiosyncratic shocks. This framework contains models of saving and capital accumulation with incomplete markets in the spirit of works by Bewley, Aiyagari, and Huggett, and models of entry, exit and...

Slavery has been a major institution of labor coercion throughout history. Colonial societies used slavery intensively across the Americas, and slavery remained prevalent in most countries after independence from the European powers. We investigate the impact of slavery on long-run development...

Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the 20th century. This essay reviews the...

This paper argues that in the presence of intersectoral input-output linkages, microeconomic idiosyncratic shocks may lead to aggregate fluctuations. In particular, it shows that, as the economy becomes more disaggregated, the rate at which aggregate volatility decays is determined by the...

The propagation of macroeconomic shocks through input-output and geographic networks can be a powerful driver of macroeconomic fluctuations. We first exposit that in the presence of Cobb-Douglas production functions and consumer preferences, there is a specific pattern of economic transmission...

We introduce the possibility of direct punishment by specialized enforcers into a model of community enforcement. Specialized enforcers need to be given incentives to carry out costly punishments. Our main result shows that, when the specialized enforcement technology is sufficiently effective,...

We document a change in the character and quality of Turkish economic growth with a turning point around 2007 and link this change to the reversal in the nature of economic institutions, which eat underwent a series of growth-enhancing reforms following Turkey's financial crisis in 2001, but...