The paper studies equilibrium pricing in a product market for an indivisible good where buyers search for sellers. Buyers search sequentially for sellers, but do not meet every seller with the same probability. Specifically, a fraction of the buyers' meetings lead to one particular large seller,...

This paper is a study of the shape and structure of the distribution of prices at which an identical good is sold in a given market and time period. We find that the typical price distribution is symmetric and leptokurtic, with a standard deviation between 19% and 36%. Only 10% of the variance...

We propose a novel theory of self-fulfilling unemployment fluctuations. According to this theory, a firm hiring an additional worker creates positive external effects on other firms, as a worker has more income to spend and less time to search for low prices when he is employed than when he is...

We analyze a labor market with search and matching frictions where wage setting is controlled by a monopoly union. We take a benevolent view of the union, assuming it to care equally about employed and unemployed workers, to treat identical workers in identical jobs the same, as well as to be...

Intangible capital is an important factor of production in modern economies that is generally neglected in business cycle analyses. We demonstrate that intangible capital can have a substantial impact on business cycle dynamics, especially if the intangible is complementary with production...

Firms spend substantial resources on marketing and selling. Interpreting this as evidence of frictions in product markets, which require firms to spend resources on customer acquisition, this paper develops a search theoretic model of firm dynamics in frictional product markets. Introducing...

We analyze changes in the gender structure at the top of the earnings distribution in the United States over the last 30 years using a 10% sample of individual earnings histories from the Social Security Administration. Despite making large inroads, females still constitute a small proportion of...

This paper posits a notion of the value of an individual's human capital and the associated return on human capital. These concepts are examined using U.S. data on male earnings and financial asset returns. We find that (1) the value of human capital is far below the value implied by discounting...

We provide new evidence on the the cyclical behavior of household size in the United States from 1979 to 2010. During economic downturns, people live in larger households. This is mostly, but not entirely, driven by young people moving into or delaying departure from the parental home. We assess...

A wide body of empirical evidence finds that around 25 percent of fiscal stimulus payments (e.g., tax rebates) are spent on nondurable household consumption in the quarter that they are received. To interpret this fact, we develop a structural economic model where households can hold two assets:...