We study risky behavior of adolescents. Concentrating on smoking and alcohol use, we structurally estimate a dynamic social interaction model in the context of students' school networks included in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). The model allows for...

Despite facing significant uncertainty about their lifespans and health care costs, most retirees do not buy annuities or long-term care insurance. In this paper, I find that retirees' saving and insurance choices are highly inconsistent with standard life cycle models in which people care only...

We present evidence on the labor supply of CEOs, and on whether family and professional CEOs differ on this dimension. We do so through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs' diaries in a detailed and comparable fashion, and to build a bottom-up measure of CEO labor supply. The...

We analyze a model economy with many agents, each with a different productivity level. Agents divide their time between two activities: producing goods with the production-related knowledge they already have, and interacting with others in search of new, productivity-increasing ideas. These...

Major strands of recent macroeconomic theory hinge on the relation of workers' efforts to their wages, but there has been no direct general evidence on this relation. This study uses data from household surveys for 1975 and 1981 that include detailed time diaries to examine how changes in the...

Using climate change as a prototype motivating example, this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low-probability high-impact catastrophes. The paper shows that having an uncertain multiplicative parameter, which scales or amplifies exogenous shocks and...

This paper examines whether there are complementarities between investments in ICT, R&D and organizational innovation, and the effects of different investment profiles on total factor productivity growth on Dutch firm-level data. We estimate an integrated model of investment profile adoption and...

We show that shocks to household consumption growth are negatively skewed, persistent, countercyclical, and drive asset prices. We construct a parsimonious model where heterogeneous households have recursive preferences. A single state variable drives the conditional cross-sectional moments of...

Product availability impacts many industries such as transportation, events, and retail, yet little empirical evidence documents the importance of stocking decisions for firm profits, vertical relationships, or consumers. We conduct several experiments, exogenously removing top-selling products...

This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and, potentially, shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the...