This paper presents a model of sovereign default with multi-period debt contracts with endogenous maturity. The sovereign in the model chooses the most favorable combination of interest rate, loan size and maturity out of the contracts oered in equilibrium by international lenders. All three...

The procyclicality of inventory investment is a central feature of US business cycles. As such, it provides a test for the recent literature on news shocks, which argues that anticipated changes in fundamentals are important sources of aggregate fluctuations. We show that, in a range of...

How does the distribution of assets affect job search decisions? We analyze unemployed workers and how their asset holdings affect the allocation to jobs of different productivity. In the absence of insurance, workers with low asset holdings direct their search to low productivity jobs because...

In real life labor markets firms hold at all times a variety of liquid assets not invested in their core business. Such external use of funds acts as an insurance against future adverse financial shocks, and typically varies across firms and sectors. As a result, different firms use different...

Cross-sectional data show that money holding differs significantly over household consumption and age. Liquidity demand for money (i.e., money holding per dollar of consumption) decreases as household consumption increases. It also increases with household age conditional on the level of...

The Chilean economy experienced a decade of sustained growth in aggregate output and productivity after the 1982 financial crisis. This paper analyzes the role of resource allocative efficiency on total factor productivity (TFP) of the manufacturing sector by applying the methodology of Hsieh...

I explore the role of individuals' skills and work experience in explaining the gender wage gap across occupations. I use the O*NET dataset to build an index of occupational complexity: the ratio of abstract to manual tasks. The ratio of female to male wages is U-shaped across occupations...

The paper builds a life-cycle model of heterogeneous agents with search frictions, in which individuals choose a sequence of saving and labor supply faced with uncertainty in longevity, employment, health status and medical expenditures. Unemployed individuals decide search intensity and whether...

Are firms' expectations biased? Does it matter? We use micro data on firms' production expectations from the German IFO Business Climate Survey and compare them to realization data from the same survey. We then construct series of quantitative firm-specific expectation errors. We find that...

We study optimal taxation in a dynamic Mirrlees' incentive structure where both aggregate and idiosyncratic risks are present. When aggregate shocks are i.i.d., we characterize the steady-state of our economy and prove the existence of an invariant distribution of expected utilities, which is...