This paper examines the relationship between trade and investment in technology adoption when firms face demand uncertainty. Our model predicts that, for a given overall market size, exporting to several countries reduces firms' demand uncertainty and, hence, raises incentives to invest in...

The specification of an optimizing model of the monetary transmission mechanism requires selecting a policy regime, commonly commitment or discretion. In this paper we propose a new procedure for testing optimal monetary policy, relying on moment inequalities that nest commitment and discretion...

There is substantial evidence that countries or regions with stronger trade linkages tend to have business cycles which are more synchronized. However, the standard international business cycle framework cannot replicate this finding. In this paper we study a multiple- country model of...

Substantial evidence suggests that countries with stronger trade linkages have more synchronized business cycles. The standard international business cycle framework cannot replicate this finding, uncovering the trade-comovement puzzle. We show that under certain macro-level conditions but...

I study the impact of idiosyncratic earnings uncertainty on aggregate saving and employment in an economy populated by families consisting of two members. Families incur a fixed cost of participation when both members are employed. I argue that, because of market incompleteness and private...

In this paper, we attempt to understand the determinants of mobility by introducing the concept of local social capital. Investing in local ties is rational when workers anticipate that they will not move to another region. Reciprocally, once local social capital is accumulated, incentives to...

European labor markets are characterized by the low geographical mobility of workers. The absence of mobility is a factor behind high unemployment when jobless people prefer to remain in their home region rather than to go prospecting in more dynamic areas. In this paper, we attempt to...

I illustrate that the welfare improvement property of the Melitz model is due to the shape of the aggregate labor demand curve, which slopes upwards. By slightly changing some assumptions in the model, this curve may have a negative slope. In this case, increases in aggregate productivity result...

Employment protection (EPL) has a well known negative impact on labor flows as well as an ambiguous but often negative effect on employment. In contrast, its impact on capital accumulation and capital-labor ratio is less well understood. The available empirical evidence suggests a non-monotonic...