Is skill dispersion a source of comparative advantage? While it is established that a country's aggregate endowment of human capital is an important determinant of comparative advantage, this paper investigates whether the distribution of skills in the labor force can play a role in the...

This paper investigates the relationship between the size of interest groups in terms of voter representation and the interest group?s campaign contributions to politicians. We uncover a robust hump-shaped relationship between the voting share of an interest group and its contributions to a...

What are idiosyncratic shocks and how do people respond to them? This paper starts from the observation that idiosyncratic shocks are experienced at the individual level, but responses to shocks can encompass the whole household. Understanding and accurately modeling these responses is essential...

This paper critically appraises the di erent approaches that have characterized the literature on the macroeconomic e ects of job reallocations from Lilien's seminal work to recent developments rooted in structural general equilibrium models, nonlinear econometric techniques and the concepts of...

This paper critically appraises the approaches that have characterized the literature on the macroeconomic effects of job reallocations. Since Lilien's (1982) seminal contribution there has been a flourishing of empirical analysis but no unifying theoretical framework has obtained consensus in...

This paper compares partial and general equilibrium effects of alternative financial aid policies intended to promote college participation. We build an overlapping generations life-cycle, heterogeneous-agent, incomplete-markets model with education, labor supply, and consumption/saving...

We estimate the costs of occupational mobility using a novel approach that relies on aggregate flows of workers across occupations rather than on wage data. The theoretical underpinnings for this approach are derived from a model of occupation choice that delivers a gravity equation linking...