A group of friends consider renting a house but they shall first agree on how to allocate its rooms and share the rent. We propose an auction mechanism for room assignment-rent division problems which mimics the market mechanism. Our auction mechanism is efficient, envy-free,...

Parents gauge school quality in part by the level of student achievement and a school's racial mix. The importance of school characteristics in the housing market can be seen in the jump in house prices at school district boundaries where peer characteristics change. The question of whether...

Lottery estimates suggest oversubscribed urban charter schools boost student achievement markedly. But these estimates needn’t capture treatment effects for students who haven’t applied to charter schools or for students attending charters for which demand is weak. This paper reports...

Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the United States than in continental European countries (CEU) since the 1970s. Moreover, this inequality gap has further widened during this period as the US has experienced a large increase in wage inequality, whereas the CEU has seen only...

We develop a quantitative dynamic general-equilibrium model where agents have preferences featuring temptation and self-control problems, and we apply it in order to understand to what extent standard investment/savings subsidies can improve welfare. The dynamic model of preferences builds on...

We study quantitatively how far shifts in the credit supply can generate a boom-bust cycle, similar to the one observed in the US around 2008. For this purpose, we develop a general equilibrium model that combines a rich heterogeneous agent overlapping-generations structure of households who...

In this paper we present an analytically tractable overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation, and study its implications for the evolution of the U.S. wage distribution from 1970 to 2000. The key feature of the model, and the only source of heterogeneity, is that individuals...

What determines the earnings of a worker relative to his peers in the same occupation? What makes a worker fail in one occupation but succeed in another? More broadly, what are the factors that determine the productivity of a worker-occupation match? In this paper, we propose an empirical...

In this paper, we construct a parsimonious overlapping-generations model of human capital accumulation and study its quantitative implications for the evolution of the U.S. wage distribution from 1970 to 2000. A key feature of the model is that individuals differ in their ability to accumulate...