The role played by financial intermediaries and banks in modern economies is undeniably critical. However, explaining their importance in a theoretical general equilibrium framework presents some challenges. If firms and households have unrestricted access to complete financial markets, then at...

This dissertation consists of two essays studying macroeconomics questions about labor markets. The research in this document is separated into chapters that study distinct features of aggregate labor market outcomes.The first essay documents the change in behavior of fertility rate at business...

Dynamic factor models (DFM) and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models are widely used for empirical research in macroeconomics. The empirical factor literature argues that the co-movement of large panels of macroeconomic and financial data can be captured by relatively few common...

I study the evolution of aggregate volatility in the US during the postwar period by assessing the relative role played by financial shocks, technological progress, and changes in the financial system. Balance-sheet variables of firms have been characterized by greater volatility since the early...

In Chapter 2, "Accounting for Cross-Country Differences in Intergenerational Earnings Persistence: The Impact of Taxation and Public Education Expenditure," I study the determinants of cross-country differences in intergenerational earnings persistence between fathers and sons. Western economies...

This dissertation uses quantitative dynamic models to study two separate questions in international finance and international labor markets.In Chapter 2, we build a two-country two-good incomplete markets general equilibrium model of international portfolio choice, and use it to study global...

In this paper, I investigate the logic behind cross sectional dispersion of firm's capital structure. I incorporate the trade off between tax benefits and financial distress costs into a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and their endogenous entry/exit, and compute an...

This thesis consists of three chapters, each of which focuses on different aspects of economic inequality.First, we investigate the differences in wage inequality between the United States and continental European countries (CEU). Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the US compared...

This thesis explores the important link between macroeconomic dynamics and the financial sector. The first essay studies Epstein-Zin preferences, which are found to be able to account for both aggregate macroeconomic dynamics and asset prices. In the first essay, I compare different solution...

In the first chapter, I develop and estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model with imperfectly informed firms in the sense of Woodford (2002). The model has two aggregate shocks: a monetary policy shock and a technology shock. Firms observe idiosyncratic noisy signals about these shocks and...