Increasing wage inequality between similar workers plays an important role for overall inequality trends in industrialized societies. To analyze this pattern, we incorporate directed labor market search into a dynamic model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and homogeneous workers....

Increasing wage inequality between similar workers plays an important role for overall inequality trends in industrialized societies. To analyze this pattern, we incorporate directed labor market search into a dynamic model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and homogeneous workers....

We solve a long-term contracting problem with symmetric uncertainty about the agent's quality, and a hidden action of the agent. As information about quality accumulates, incentives become easier to provide because the agent has less room to manipulate the principal's beliefs. This result is...

This paper analyzes the effect of labor and product market regulation in a dynamic stochastic equilibrium with search frictions. Modeling multiple-worker firms allows us to distinguish between the exit-and-entry (extensive) margin, and the hiring-and-firing (intensive) margin. We characterize...

This paper documents a robust empirical regularity: in the long-run, higher trade openness is causally associated to a lower structural rate of unemployment. We establish this fact using: (i) panel data from 20 OECD countries, (ii) cross-sectional data on a larger set of countries. The time...

We analyze a long-term contracting problem involving common uncertainty about a parameter capturing the productivity of the relationship, and featuring a hidden action for the agent. We develop an approach that works for any utility function when the parameter and noise are normally distributed...

We show that more human capital improves incentives in a standard optimal taxation problem: common assumptions about preferences and technology imply that the disutility of labor decreases less strongly in unobserved ability if agents have more human capital. Human capital thus reduces the...

We characterize optimal redistribution in a dynastic family model with human capital. We show how a government can improve the trade-off between equality and incentives by changing the amount of observable human capital. We provide an intuitive decomposition for the wedge between human-capital...

We characterize optimal redistribution in a dynastic family model with human capital. We show how a government can improve the trade-off between equality and incentives by changing the amount of observable human capital. We provide an intuitive decomposition for the wedge between human-capital...

We characterize optimal redistribution in a dynastic economy with observable human capital and hidden ability. We compute the optimal allocation and show how it can be implemented with student loans or means-tested grants. The numerical results reveal that human capital investment should decline...