Human capital is no doubt one of the most important factors for future economic growth and well-being. However, human capital is also prone to becoming obsolete over time. Skills that have been acquired at one point in time may perfectly match the skill requirements at that time but may become...

With aging populations and increased demands on government revenue, countries need to boost employment and earnings. Tax policy should focus on labor market entry and retirement. Those are the points where labor supply is most responsive to tax incentives, which can enhance the flow into work of...

Relative to those for high school graduates, lifetime earnings for college graduates are higher for more recent cohorts. At the same time, across successive cohorts born after 1950, there is a stagnation in the fraction of high school graduates that go on to complete a college degree. What...

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...

Yang's theory of economic specialization under increasing returns to scale (Yang, 2001) is a formal development of the fundamental Smith-Young theorem on the extent of the market and the social division of labor. In this theory, specialization — and thus, the social division of labor — is...

In the paper, the concept of Walrasian sequential equilibrium is developed to formalize the notions of fundamental social and endogenous uncertainties and decentralized social learning. It predicts that social sequential experiments with efficient as well as inefficient network patterns of...

No abstract received.

This paper brings order to the vast conceptual and empirical literature on measuring transaction costs. It critically reviews the broad and diverse landscape of the field of transaction costs measurement, ranging from financial economics, Williamsonian transaction cost economics, the transaction...

The transaction cost literature continues to mature as improvements have been made on both theoretical and empirical fronts. Over the past several years, serious attempts have been made to actually measure transaction costs. Here I argue that successful measurement must solve three...

Classical trade theory is based on exogenous comparative advantage. The existence of equilibrium is derived under the assumption that the output sets are (weakly) convex. In general, however, in the presence of transaction costs or in the case of production techniques with increasing returns to...