We consider an endogenous growth model in which appropriate organization fosters innovation, but because of contractibility problems, this benefit cannot be internalized. The organizational design element we focus on is the division of labor, which as Adam Smith argued, facilitates invention by...

We examine the evolution of the demand for skilled workers relative to unskilled workers in the Chilean manufacturing sector following Chile’s liberalization of trade in the late 1970’s. Following such trade reforms, the standard Heckscher-Olin model predicts that a low labor-cost country...

This paper presents a recursive method for the computation of sequential competitive equilibria in dynamic models with heterogeneous agents and market frictions. This computational method builds on a convergent operator defined over an expanded set of state variables for which a Markovian...

This paper develops a continuous time real options model to study the interaction between industry structure and takeover activity. In an asymmetric industry equilibrium, firms have an endogenous incentive to merge when restructuring decisions are motivated by operating and strategic benefits....

Without capital market imperfections, the capital structure of a firm, including the size, the maturity and the currency composition of debts, should not matter for investment decisions. The Asian financial crises provide a good opportunity to test this hypothesis. We approach the problem in two...

A government or public organization would like to subsidize an indivisible good. Consumers’ valuations of the good vary according to their wealth and benefits from the good. Education, medical care, and housing are common examples. A regulator has access to either wealth or benefit...

Previous work studying the age distribution of citations for patents relies on functional form assumptions to address the co-linearity between the birth year, citation year, and age. This paper proposes a non-parametric identification strategy that uses the lag between application and grant as a...

In a recent article, Barro (2006) revives the Rietz explanation of the equity premium. Rietz (1988) showed that infrequent, large drops in consumption make the theoretical equity premium large. Barro shows empirically that in the XXth century, disasters are frequent and large enough, and stock...