We model an overlapping-generations economy with two skill levels: skilled and unskilled. The welfare-state is modeled simply by a proportional tax on labor income to finance a demogrant in a balanced-budget manner. Therefore, some (the unskilled workers and old retirees) are net beneficiaries...

It is often argued that tax competition may lead to a 'race to the bottom'. This result may indeed hold in the case of factor mobility (such as capital). However, in this paper we emphasize the unique feature of labor migration, that may nullify the'race to the bottom' hypothesis. Labor...

We analyze the consequences of an increase in the supply of highly educated workers on relative and real wages in a search model where wages are set by Nash-bargaining. The key insight is that an increase in the supply of highly educated workers improves the firms? outside option. As a...

Temporary layoffs are an important feature of the United States labor market. If these employer-employee relationships exist because of valuable job-matches, unemployment among high-productivity laid-off workers may be optimal from societal perspective. However, because of asymmetric...

We study the effects of overconfidence in a two-period investment-decision agency setting. Under common priors, agent risk aversion implies inefficiently low first-period investment. In our model, principal and agent disagree about the profitability of the investment decision conditional on a...

Whereas the literature on additive measurement error has known a considerable treatment, less work has been done for multiplicative noise. In this paper we concentrate on multiplicative measurement error in the covariates, which contrary to additive error not only modifies proportionally the...

In modern macroeconomic models it is difficult to obtain explosive price bubbles on assets with positive net supply. This paper shows that it is possible to obtain explosive bubbles in certain situations when assets such as land are used as collateral and lenders are willing to lend freely...

The Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides search and matching model is the workhorse of labor macro, but it has difficulty in simultaneously matching the cyclical behavior of job loss and vacancies when taken to the data. By completely ignoring frictions in job creation and focusing instead on firm-level...

Credit risk is an important issue in many finance areas, such as the determination of cost of capital, the valuation of corporate bonds and pricing of credit derivatives. Credit risk has also been a cause and consequence of the current financial crisis. Thus, methods for measuring credit risk,...