This paper examines the time-consuming process of matching the two sides of a market each having diverse characteristics. This is cast in a labor market setting where workers of different skills need be matched with different machine qualities to produce output. I characterize the efficient...

Bank loans are more available and cheaper for new and small businesses in the U.S. in areas with highly concentrated banks than in areas with highly competitive banks. To explain this fact, we analyze banks' decisions to screen the project and their subsequent competition in loan provisions. It...

When it is costly for agents to find a match, integrating small markets into a larger one increases the matching difficulty. We examine such dependence of the number of matches on the market size by explicitely modelling firms' attempt to attract workers by posting wages. It is shown that...

This paper integrates labor market search into an intertemporal equilibrium model to analyze the dynamic macroeconomic effects of a tariff. The model captures the intuitive argument in the earlier literature that a permanent increase in the tariff improves the country's terms of trade, which...

This paper introduces search unemployment into an intertemporal maximization model with capital accumulation. It characterizes the decentralized search equilibrium, examines the dynamic effects of factor income taxation and calculates the welfare cost of the taxation. Four tax policies are...

This paper contributes to the search theory of unemployment by endogenously generating matching functions for skilled and unskilled workers from a wage-posting game. The model is capable of producing a positive skill premium and a positive wage differential among homogenous unskilled workers....

This paper examines the influence of fashion on wealth accumulation in an economy with two groups of agents. Fashion is modelled as an externality generated by a particular dependence of individual agents' time preference on the two groups' per-capita consumption habits. It is shown that fashion...

The authors analyze markets where each of n buyers wants to buy one unit and each of m sellers wants to sell one or more units of an indivisible good. Sellers first set prices, then buyers choose which sellers to visit. There are equilibria where each buyer visits sellers at random and faces a...

We analyze bureaucracy and corruption in a market with decentralized exchange and "lemons." Exchange is modeled as a sequence of bilateral, random matches. Agents have private information about the quality of goods they produce and can supplement trade with socially inefficient bribes....