Mortgage loans are leading examples of transactions where experts on one side of the market take advantage of consumers' lack of knowledge and experience. We study the compensation that borrowers pay to mortgage brokers for assistance from application to closing. Two findings support the...

The standard venture-capital contract rewards entrepreneurs only for creating successful companies that go public or are acquired on favorable terms. As a result, entrepreneurs receive no help from venture capital in avoiding the huge idiosyncratic risk of the typical venture-backed startup....

In the standard venture capital contract, entrepreneurs have a large fraction of equity ownership in the companies they found and are paid a sub-market salary by the investors who provide the money to develop the idea. The big rewards come only to those whose companies go public or are acquired...

We describe a new index of the current and historical returns to venture-type capital. The conceptual basis for the index is the value of a continuously reinvested value-weighted portfolio of all venture-backed and similar pre-public companies. It provides a metric for private equity comparable...

We investigate the stochastic relation between income and consumption (specifically, consumption of food) within a panel of about 2,000 households. Our major findings are: 1. Consumption responds much more strongly to permanent than to transitory movements of income. 2. The response to...

Adjustment costs determine the dynamics of the response of an industry's output to a shift in demand. Absent any adjustment costs, an increase in demand not accompanied by any change in factor prices raises output, labor, capital, and materials in the same proportion. In the presence of...

Under the assumption of constant returns to scale, there is a very simple, easily testable condition for optimal investment under uncertainty. Application of the test requires no parametric assumptions about technology and no assumptions about the competitiveness of the output market. The...

Some workers bargain with prospective employers before accepting a job. Others could bargain, but find it undesirable, because their right to bargain has induced a sufficiently favorable offer, which they accept. Yet others perceive that they cannot bargain over pay; they regard the posted wage...

Macroeconomic research on consumption has been influenced profoundly by rational expectations. First, rational expectations together with the hypothesis of constant expected real interest rates implies that consumption should evolve as a random walk. Much of the research of the past decade has...

What are the fundamental driving forces of macroeconomic fluctuations? In particular, why do people spend more time working in booms and less in recessions? These are basic questions of macroeconomics. Recent thinking has emphasized technology shifts, preference shifts, and changes in government...