Option value arises in environments where an investment needs to be made under uncertainty. The decision to invest in postsecondary education is a perfect example. Students, as they learn about the uncertain educational outcomes, can drop out or transfer up to harder and more rewarding schools...

We present a dynamic model of college education where the students face uncertainty about their income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. As students write exams, they reevaluate their expectations and may find it optimal to drop out and...

In modern democracies, public policies are negotiated among elected policymakers. Yet, most macroeconomic models abstract from post-election negotiation. In order to understand the determinants of redistribution, this paper studies legislative bargaining in a growth model where individuals are...

We consider an inventory model for a liquid asset where the per-period net expenditures have two components: one that is frequent and small and another that is infrequent and large. We give a theoretical characterization of the optimal management of liquid asset as well as of the implied...

The problem of efficient sharing of a resource is nearly ubiquitous. Except for pure public goods, each agent's use creates a negative externality; often the negative externality is so strong that efficient sharing is impossible in the short run. We show that, paradoxically, the impossibility of...

Using a model in which anticipations about the future determine current spending, we take a medium-frequency look at time series data around the Great Recession, the Great Depression, and the Japanese crisis of the 1990s. This leads us to highlight some common features of these three episodes:...

I examine a version of the Lagos and Wright (2005) monetary model where coercive lump-sum taxation is infeasible. Despite this restriction, I demonstrate that the first-best allocation remains implementable under an appropriately designed monetary policy; at least, if agents are sufficiently...

The international trade literature finds strong links between firm growth and export decisions. In spite of this, the literature analyzing cross-country differences in firm growth commonly abstracts from trade. We develop a tractable, dynamic model to understand the consequences of this...