In this paper we use data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Research Database in order to assess the extent of the cross-sectoral variation in firm-level idiosyncratic risk and shed light on its determinants. We find that firms producing investment goods exhibit greater volatility in...

The initial expansionary phase of the business cycle appears to be characterized by what commentators have labelled a puzzling "jobless recovery" phase i.e., rapid growth in productivity (and output) with relatively sluggish expansion in employment. We demonstrate that a jobless recovery is a...

We uncover conditions on the initial income and net foreign assets of potential union members such that forming a union is welfare-improving over standing alone in the world economy. Our model predicts that economic unions (i) occur relatively infrequently, and are more likely to emerge (ii)...

The goal of this paper is to develop and calibrate a quantitative general equilibrium model to account for the joint evolution of educational attainment and relative wages among education groups in the U.S. over the 20th century. The key exogenous explanatory variables we consider are...

We investigate the role of direct public support for education in explaining the post-WWII evolution of college attainment in the U.S. College attainment has surged from the end of WWII until the early 1970s, then declined for about a decade and has been slowly recovering towards the level of...

We develop a framework which allows us to study the effect of financing constraints for both firm-level investment decisions, and household-level schooling decisions. We characterize the joint determination of occupational choices, educational outcomes, and production decisions. We first...

Since the seminal contribution of Berk, Green, and Naik (Journal of Finance, 1999), we have witnessed a growing interest in rationalizing the observed cross-sectional relation between investment and stock returns. Unfortunately, however, the extant literature falls short of ensuring that the...

We amend Hopenhayn's model of equilibrium industry dynamics by explicitly modeling the firm's investment choice and by introducing aggregate fluctuations. Our main goal is to study the model's implications for the cyclical behavior of entry, exit, and the cross--section of operating firms. We...

contract. We focus our attention on testable implications: (i) the relationship between compensation and firm size, (ii) the relative importance of current and deferred compensation, (iii) the sensitivity of compensation to innovations in shareholder wealth, and (iv) the relationship between...

We study the cyclical implications of endogenous firm-level entry and exit decisions in a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model wherein firms face persistent shocks to both aggregate and individual productivity. The model we explore is in the spirit of Hopenhayn (1992). Firms' decisions...