We develop a theory of endogenous and stochastic fluctuations in economic activity. Individual firms choose to randomize over firing or keeping workers who performed poorly in the past to give them an ex-ante incentive to exert effort. Different firms choose to correlate the outcome of their...

For governments who want to improve their economies via fiscal, monetary, trade or exchange rate policies, the tradeoff between the inflation rate and the unemployment rate is extremely important. This tradeoff has become known as the Phillips curve. Among economists there is no consensus on how...

We study unemployment insurance in a framework where the main source of heterogeneity among agents is the type of household they live in: some agents live alone while others live with their spouses as a family. Our exercise is motivated by the fact that married individuals can rely on spousal...