to explain any of the existing puzzles.

During the last thirty years, labor markets in advanced economies where characterized by their remarkable polarization. As job opportunities in middle-skill occupations disappeared, employment opportunities concentrated in the highest- and lowest wage occupations. I develop a two-country...

During the last three decades, the U.S. labor market was characterized by its employment polarization. As jobs in the middle of the skill distribution disappeared, employment expanded for the high and low-skill occupations. Real wages did not follow the same pattern. While earnings for the...

In this paper, we first introduce investment-specific technology (IST) shocks to an otherwise standard international real business cycle model and show that a thoughtful calibration of them along the lines of Raffo (2009) successfully addresses the "quantity", "international comovement",...

Using data for El Salvador and Bayesian techniques, we develop and estimate a two-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of remittances in emerging market economies. We focus our study on whether rising levels of remittances result in the Dutch disease...

This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...

Starting from a variant of the New Keynesian model for a small open economy, I extend the standard credit channel framework to show that the presence of imperfect competition in the banking system propagates external shocks and amplifies the business cycle. This novel modeling of the banking...

In order to explore the displacement evolution of a creeping landslide stabilized with piles, an analytical model is proposed in this paper. Mechanical behaviors of the sliding surface and the sliding layer in the model are assumed to be visco-plastic and elastic, respectively. Equilibrium of a...

The line-cell conversion is established as a new production system towards converting traditional conveyor assembly line to a cell system, in which one (or multiple) worker carries out all of the operations of a job in a cell. Its performance improvement can be enhanced by reducing worker(s)...

The line-cell (or line-seru) conversion is an innovation of assembly system applied widely in the electronics industry. Its essence is tearing out an assembly line and adopting a mini-assembly unit, called seru (or Japanese style assembly cell). In this paper, we develop a multi-objective...