We estimate a search-based real business cycle economy using quantity data and a broad set of wage indicators, allowing the latent wage to follow a non-structural ARMA process. Under the estimated process, wages adjust immediately to most shocks and induce substantial variation in labor's share...

I construct a general, multi-good model of consumption externalities that allows for relative jealousies and relative keeping-up-with-the-Joneses effects. These relative social consumption contexts have the ability to reinforce or mitigate each other.

We study optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an environment where explicit frictions give rise to valued money, making money essential in the sense that it expands the set of feasible trades. Our main results are in stark contrast to the prescriptions of earlier flexible-price Ramsey models....

We characterize efficient allocations and cyclical fluctuations in a labor selection model. Potential new hires are heterogenous in the cross-section in their degree of training costs. In a calibrated version of the model that identifies costly selection with micro-level data on training costs,...

We study optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an environment where explicit frictions give rise to valued money, making money essential in the sense that it expands the set of feasible trades. The two main results are that the Friedman Rule is typically not optimal, and the long-run capital...

We characterize efficient allocations and business cycle fluctuations in a labor-selection model. Due to forward-looking hiring costs and labor supply decisions, efficiency entails both static and intertemporal dimensions. We develop welfare-relevant measures of marginal rates of transformation...