We model worker heterogeneity in the rents from being employed in a Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model of matching and unemployment. We show that heterogeneity, reflecting differences in match quality and worker assets, reduces the extent of fluctuations in separations and unemployment. We find...

We model unemployment allowing workers to differ by comparative advantage in market work. Workers with comparative advantage are identified by who works more hours when employed. This enables us to test the model by grouping workers based on their long-term wages and hours from panel data. The...

We introduce worker differences in labor supply, reflecting differences in skills and assets, into a model of separations, matching, and unemployment over the business cycle. Separating from employment when unemployment duration is long is particularly costly for workers with high labor supply....

We consider a matching model of employment with wages that are flexible for new hires, but sticky within matches. We depart from standard treatments of sticky wages by allowing effort to respond to the wage being too high or low. Shimer (2004) and others have illustrated that employment in the...

This paper assesses biases in policy predictions due to the lack of invariance of "structural'' parameters in representative-agent models. We simulate data under various fiscal policy regimes from a heterogeneous-agents economy with incomplete asset markets and indivisible labor supply....

Three large current account imbalances -- one deficit (the United States) and two surpluses (Japan and the Euro area) -- are subjected to a minimalist structural interpretation. Though simple, this interpretation enables us to assess how much of each of the imbalances require a real exchange...

This paper tests the importance of precautionary and mercantilist motives in accounting for the hoarding of international reserves by developing countries, and provides a model that quantifies the welfare gains from optimal management of international reserves. While the variables associated...

The sizable hoarding of international reserves by several East Asian countries has been frequently attributed to a modern version of monetary mercantilism -- hoarding international reserves in order to improve competitiveness. From a long-run perspective, manufacturing exporters in East Asia...

Ongoing international financial integration has greatly increased foreign asset holdings across countries, enhancing the scope for a "valuation channel" of external adjustment (i.e., the changes in a country's net foreign asset position due to exchange rate and asset price changes). We examine...

A sticky-price model is used to motivate a structural VAR analysis of the current account and the real exchange rate for seven major industrialized countries (the US, Canada, the UK, Japan, Germany, France and Italy). The analysis is distinguished from previous work in that it adopts minimal...