The recent growth in the market for target-date funds (TDFs) allows us to study how mutual fund families structure new investment products. Given the widespread, legislation-induced use of TDFs as default investments in defined contribution retirement plans, this market holds special policy...

This paper studies the distributive effects of growth when different agents' income is drawn from accumulated and non-accumulated factors of production in different proportions, notes that political interactions may contribute to determine factor shares and growth when income sources are...

This paper proposes a model of diversifiable uncertainty, irreversible investment decisions, and endogenous growth. The detailed microeconomic structure of the model makes it possible to study the general equilibrium effects of obstacles to labor mobility. Labor mobility costs reduce private...

Despite stringent dismissal restrictions in most European countries, rates of job creation and destruction are remarkably similar across European and North American labor markets. This paper shows that relative-wage compression is conducive to higher employer-initiated job turnover, and argues...

This paper studies simple partial equilibrium models of dynamic labor demand, under certainty. Labor turnover costs may or may not decrease the firm's average labor demand, depending on the form of the revenue function, on the rates of discount and of labor attrition, and on the relative size of...

We propose and solve an optimizing model which explains counterintuitive effects of fiscal policy in terms of expectations. If government spending follows an upward-trending stochastic process which the public believes may fall sharply when it reaches specific "target points," then optimizing...

Investment is often irreversible, in that installed capital has little or no value unless used in production. In the presence of ongoing uncertainty, an individual firm's irreversible investment policy optimally alternates short bursts of positive gross investment to periods of inaction, when...

We study positive and normative aspects of steady-state equilibrium in a market where firms of endogenous size experience idiosyncratic shocks and undergo a costly search process to hire their workers. The stylized model we propose highlights interactions between job-security provisions and...

Using data from 17 OECD countries over the 1960-96 period, we investigate the impact of institutions on the relative employment of youth, women, and older individuals. Theoretically, we show that labor market institutions meant to improve workers' income share imply larger disemployment effects...

This paper proposes a tractable and realistic nonlinear model of exchange rate dynamics, and argues that its predictions are consistent with available empirical evidence on exchange rate and interest differential behavior in real-life target zones. In our model, the exchange rate fluctuates...