This paper examines the importance of ex-ante heterogeneity for understanding the relationship between wealth and labor supply when markets are incomplete. An infinite horizon model is estimated where labor supply is indivisible and households are ex-ante heterogeneous in their labor disutility...

We study asset-tested unemployment insurance in an incomplete markets model with moral hazard during job search. Optimal asset testing is weak and yields negligible welfare gains. The optimal replacement rate of an unemployed worker with zero liquidity is 9 percentage points higher than that of...

This paper presents an analysis of the trends in inequality across income, earnings and consumption in Britain since 1978. It documents the episodic nature of inequality growth over this period largely dominated by the inequality 'boom' in earnings inequality of the 1980s. It builds a consistent...

I document that workers in newly tradable service occupations possess more occupation-specific human capital and are more highly educated than workers in previously tradable occupations. Motivated by this observation, I develop a dynamic equilibrium model with labor market frictions and specific...

This paper assesses the trade-off between acquiring specialized skills targeted for a particular occupation and acquiring a package of skills that diversifies risk across occupations. Individual-level data on college credits across subjects and labor market dynamics reveal that diversification...

I consider two different skill accumulation technologies, learning by doing and Ben-Porath type training. The effect of human capital accumulation in the form of learning by doing is to increase the labor supply elasticity estimate by a factor of 2.1 relative to the estimate that ignores human...

Despite mandatory parental leave policies being a prevalent feature of labor markets in developed countries, their aggregate effects in the economy are not well understood. To assess their quantitative impact, we develop a general equilibrium model of fertility and labor market decisions that...

This paper makes three contributions: First, I construct annual time series of gross domestic investment and national saving in the U.S. for the 1897–1949 period using historical component series. I compare the qualitative and quantitative properties of the newly constructed series with the...

How does the persistence of earnings change over the life cycle? Do workers at different ages face the same variance of idiosyncratic earnings shocks? This paper proposes a novel specification for residual earnings that allows for an age profile in the persistence and variance of labor income...

In this paper I analyze the effects of innovations in information technology on the mortgage and housing markets using a life-cycle model with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic income, as well as moving and house price shocks. I explicitly model the housing tenure choices of households....