Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

In this paper I study a model of life-cycle consumption in which individuals react optimally to their own income process but ignore economy wide information. Since individual income is less persistent than aggregate income consumers will react too little to aggregate income variation. Aggregate...