In this paper, we ask to what extent changes to the age and sex structure of the population account for the changes in the marriage behavior observed in the United States in the last century (from 1900 to 1980). The decrease in mortality, especially for women, and the changes in immigration...

We revisit the issue of the usefulness of Social Security when there are frictions that prevent the existence of a fluid market for annuities. We model households as families and not as individual agents which provides a rationale for the existence of life insurance. Moreover, our structure also...

We propose a theory of unsecured debt that is based on the existence of private information about a person's type and on the fact that some debtors have the incentive to forego bankruptcy in order to signal their type. The theory formalizes the idea that the type of a person is relevant to...

In this paper we address the time-inconsistency of optimal debt policy—the incentive for a current government to “manipulate interest ratesâ€â€”raised in Lucas and Stokey’s celebrated 1983 paper. The literature that followed suggested various ways to fully overcome...

We develop an heterogeneous agent model of consumption and health choices in order to estimate the effect of heath status in the marginal utility of consumption. We use micro data from the HRS, PSID, and CEX to identify the parameters of interest from the observed consumption growth for...

We develop a theory on the joint dynamics of labor share and technology at the business cycle frequency. Our main motivating fact is the overshooting property of the labor share: After a positive technology shock, the share of output that corresponds to labor falls temporarily but it quickly...

This paper develops a new quantitative theory of long-term unsecured credit contracts. Households can default and can switch credit lines. Banks can change the credit limit at any time, but must commit to the interest rate or not depending on the regulatory setting. Without commitment, the...

Between the mid 1970's and the beginning of the 2000's the share of single females grew dramatically in the U.S. (from 21% to 32%). So did the share of single mothers (from 10% to 14%). At the same time relative wages within and between sexes underwent huge changes. In this paper we measure the...

consequently, have different redistributional properties which is what we explore in this paper. For Canada, which has a positive net asset position with respect to the rest of the world in Canadian dollar-denominated claims, we show that the magnitude of the effects of an unexpected price level...

The paper explores to what extent demand shocks can solve the open economy puz- zles. To this purpose, we pose a shopping model structure a la Bai, R 퀱os-Rull, and Storesletten (2011) on top of an otherwise standard two-country international real busi- ness cycle model. Shopping for goods...