Commonly used frictional models of the labor market imply that changes in frictions have large effects on steady state employment and unemployment. We use a model that features both frictions and an operative labor supply margin to examine the robustness of this feature to the inclusion of a...

We study an all-pay contest with multiple identical prizes ("lifeboat seats"). Prizes are partitioned into subsets of prizes ("lifeboats"). Players play a two-stage game. First, each player chooses an element of the partition ("a lifeboat"). Then each player competes for a prize in the subset...

Women and men may differ in their propensity to choose a risky outcome because of innate preferences or because pressure to conform to gender-stereotypes encourages girls and boys to modify their innate preferences. Single-sex environments are likely to modify students' risk-taking preferences...

This paper presents a rational expectations model of optimal executive compensation in a setting where managers are in a position to manipulate short-term stock prices, and managers' propensity to manipulate is uncertain. Stock-based incentives elicit not only productive effort, but also costly...

Using the first two waves of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey, we investigate how a father’s temporary absence affects children left behind in terms of their school attendance, household expenditures on education, and nonhousework labor supply in the 1990s. The estimating subsample is...

The rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in world trade has brought both benefits and anxiety to other economies. For many policy questions, it is crucial to know the extent of foreign value added (FVA) in exports. We review a general formula in Koopman, Wang and Wei (2008) for...

This paper documents a decreasing trend in the geographical concentration of EU agro-food imports. Decomposing the concentration indices into intensive and extensive margins components, we find that the decrease in overall concentration indices results from two diverging trends: the pattern of...

Exploiting the Japanese banking crisis as a laboratory, we provide firm-level evidence on the real effects of bank bailouts. Government recapitalizations result in positive abnormal returns for the clients of recapitalized banks. After recapitalizations, banks extend larger loans to their...

With applied work in mind, we define an equilibrium notion for dynamic games with asymmetric information which does not require a specification for players' beliefs about their opponent types. This enables us to define equilibrium conditions which, at least in principal, are testable and can be...

Medical research indicates that breastfeeding suppresses post-natal fertility. We model the implications for breastfeeding decisions and test the model's predictions using survey data from India. First, we find that breastfeeding increases with birth order, since mothers near or beyond their...