We derive the properties of the distribution of wealth and idiosyncratic risk across occupations at the constrained-efficient allocation.

In 1900, one mother died for every 118 live births in the United States. Approximately 15,000 women died of childbirth each year between 1900 and 1930, and pregnancy related causes accounted for over 15% of all female deaths at age 15-44. For every death, twenty more mothers suffered obstetric...

Survey and experimental evidence point to the existence of a pervasive set of culturally-related barriers. These include lack of mentoring and role models, exclusion from informal networks, gender based stereotyping, display of style different than the organizational norms, difficulties in...

We first build a theoretical model where improvements in maternal health determine a decline in the cost of having children and reduce women's comparative advantage in home activities. Medical progress has two opposite effects on fertility: a positive direct effect that arises from the reduction...

Summarizing, unless admissibility constraints rule out the eventual implementation of the first best, all intertemporal distortions must be transitional. Hence, only settings in which first best allocations are unattainable, such as private information economies, can provide a normative basis...

The purpose of this paper is to study how progress in home production technologies and in medical technologies influences gender differences in labor market outcomes and the household division of labor, in an economy with endogenous gender roles. We consider a model in which incentive problems...

Men are generally observed to experience steeper wage increases during their work lives than women. Furthermore, men generally supply more hours to the labor market than women. While these observations are no longer as pronounced as they were 50 years ago, they still remain broadly true. This...

We study dynamic optimal taxation in a class of economies with private information over idiosyncratic skill shocks. We consider economies in which the skill distribution is first order Markov. We show that there exists a tax system that implements the constrained optimal allocation as...