This paper studies consumption and labor supply in a model where agents have partial insurance and face risk and initial heterogeneity in wages and preferences. Equilibrium allocations and variances and covariances of wages, hours and consumption are solved for analytically. We prove that all...

This paper focuses on the bi-directional interaction between technology adoption and labor market conditions. We examine cross-city differences in PC-adoption, relative wages, and changes in relative wages over the period 1980-2000 to evaluate whether the patterns conform to the predictions of a...

This paper shows that existing evidence on labor supply behavior places an upper bound on risk aversion in the expected utility model. I derive a formula for the coefficient of relative risk aversion (g) in terms of (1) the ratio of the income elasticity of labor supply to the wage elasticity...

Identifying the effect of climate on societies is central to understanding historical economic development, designing modern policies that react to climatic events, and managing future global climate change. Here, I review, synthesize, and interpret recent advances in methods used to measure...

This chapter is on quantitative models of sovereign debt crises in emerging economies. We interpret debt crises broadly to cover all of the major problems a country can experience while trying to issue new debt, including default, sharp increases in the spread and failed auctions. We examine the...

In our European Economic Review (2002) paper, we used pre-1998 data on countries participating in and leaving currency unions to estimate the effect of currency unions on trade using (then-) conventional gravity models. In this paper, we use a variety of empirical gravity models to estimate the...

I introduce a model of undirected dyadic link formation which allows for assortative matching on observed agent characteristics (homophily) as well as unrestricted agent level heterogeneity in link surplus (degree heterogeneity). Like in fixed effects panel data analyses, the joint distribution...

This paper develops asymptotic econometric theory to help understand data generated by a present value model with a discount factor near one. A leading application is to exchange rate models. A key assumption of the asymptotic theory is that the discount factor approaches 1 as the sample size...

This paper develops new results for identification and estimation of Gaussian affine term structure models. We establish that three popular canonical representations are unidentified, and demonstrate how unidentified regions can complicate numerical optimization. A separate contribution of the...

This paper surveys efforts to automate the dating of business cycle turning points. Doing this on a real time, out-of-sample basis is a bigger challenge than many academics might presume due to factors such as data revisions and changes in economic relationships over time. The paper stresses the...