We study the optimal hiring and firing decisions of a firm under two different firing costs regulations: 1) Dual labor markets characterized by high firing costs for workers with seniority above a threshold ("permanent workers") and by low costs for "temporary workers". 2) The Single Labor...

This paper makes a theoretical and an empirical contribution to the debate on what caused the "global imbalances". On the empirical side, I provide different types of evidence to support that housing demand shocks (shocks to the aggregate marginal rate of substitution between housing and...

In this paper we study a new factor that matters for fertility and consumption decisions: the risks associated with having and raising a child. We analyze a real options model with incomplete markets to explicitly model both children as a risky investment and the parental option to time...

We propose a quantitative model of lending standards with two reasons for inefficient credit: lenders' moral hazard from deposit insurance or government guarantees, and imperfect information about the persistence of asset price growth, which generates incorrect but rational beliefs in the...