We develop a model featuring search frictions and a nondegenerate labor supply decision along the extensive margin, and argue that it does a reasonable job of matching labor market flows between employment, unemployment and out of the labor force. Persistent idiosyncratic productivity shocks...

This paper constructs a dynamic general-equilibrium model of the world economy and the global climate system. The goal of the paper is to characterize quantitatively the transition of the world economy, including welfare assessments, to a steady state with zero emissions of carbon. There is a...

This paper explores the asset-price implications in economies where there is no direct insurance against idiosyncratic risks but there are other assets---such as a riskfree bond or equity---that can be used for self-insurance, subject to exogenously imposed borrowing limits. We analyze an...

This paper builds a theory of the shape of the distribution of total-factor productiv- ity (TFP) across countries. The data on productivity suggests vast differences across countries, and arguably even has "twin peaks". The theory proposed here is consistent with vast differences in long-run...

We model a labor market with search and matching frictions where some or all workers belong to a (centralized) union, both in the case where coverage is exogenously given and where it is endogenous. Unions are assumed to choose identical wages for all unionized workers, and firms are assumed not...

This paper analyzes a business cycle model with labor market frictions as well as an extensive labor supply margin. There are exogenous aggregate shocks to productivity, the job finding rate, and the separation rate. Workers also face idiosyncratic productivity (wage) shocks that they cannot...

We explore a political-economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with...

How does the size of the transfer system evolve in the short and in the long run? We construct a model where taxation is distortionary because it discourages capital accumulation. We compare the Ramsey allocation with the time-consistent allocation. The latter can be interpreted as the outcome...

This paper offers several appendices for the article: the integration principle applied to the baseline model, the computational algorithm for the baseline model, calculating the welfare gain, algorithm for the model with short- and long-term unemployment, as well as additional result tables.

In this paper we document that "frictional wage inequality" (i.e. due to pure luck in the matching process in the labor market) is large and that both the standard McCall search model and the simplest Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides matching model, reasonably calibrated, are strikingly unable to...