This paper studies unemployed workers’ decisions to change occupations, and their impact on fluctuations in aggregate unemployment and its underlying duration distribution. We develop an analytically and computationally tractable stochastic equilibrium model with heterogenous labor markets. In...

This paper studies how unemployment and employment durations for immigrants and natives respond differently to changes in the economic conditions due to the 2008 crisis and to the receipt of unemployment benefits when the economy declines. Using administrative data for Spain, we estimate...

Several situations in our daily interactions are characterized by uncertainty and asymmetric information regarding the final outcomes. For example, an investor may overstate a project’s value, or a superior may choose to under, or over, state the gains from a project to a subordinate. We...

The use of citation numbers for the assessment of research quality has become highly relevant in modern science. Although it is well known that scientific domains strongly differ in terms of citation rates, bibliometric indicators currently used in research assessment are often based on the sole...

The inefficiency of competitive markets for lemons raises fundamental questions about market performance and the role of policy intervention. We study the performance of dynamic markets, and show that when the time horizon is finite decentralized markets perform better and high quality is more...

While co-integration theory is an ideal framework to study linear relationships among persistent economic time series, the intrinsic linearity in the concepts of integration and co-integration makes it unsuitable to study non-linear long run relations among persistent processes. This drawback...

The aim of this paper is to investigate how the capacity of an economic system to absorb shocks depends on the specific pattern of interconnections established among financial firms. The key trade-off at work is between the risk-sharing gains enjoyed by firms when they become more interconnected...

Recent results indicate that, in spite of the skewness of citation distributions, the ranking of research units that focus on the upper tail of citation distributions is quite similar to the ranking one obtains with average-based indicators. This paper explores the conjecture that this can be...

We compute new measures of religious diversity and intolerance and study their effects on civil conflict. Using a religion tree that describes the relationship between different religions, we compute measures of religious diversity at three different levels of aggregation. We find that religious...

Using the daily trade of futures from the prediction markets site Intrade, we pin down the effect of printed newspapers endorsements (announcement of an explicit support for a political candidate) on the candidates' likelihood of winning. It is established that unexpected endorsements have a...