What are the effects of a large temporary shock to the economy such as a temporary lockdown in response to a pandemic? Are the effects propagated and made persistent by firms’ deteriorating balance sheets and labor market frictions? This paper develops a model with financial market and labor...

We develop a model of retirement and human capital investment to study the effects of tax and retirement policies. Workers choose the supply of raw labor (career length) and also the human capital embodied in their labor. Our model explains a significant fraction of the US-Europe difference in...

We quantify the role of financial frictions and the initial misallocation of resources in explaining development dynamics. Following a reform that triggers efficient reallocation of resources, our model economy with financial frictions converges slowly to the new steady state--it takes twice as...

We provide a quantitative evaluation of the aggregate and distributional impact of microfinance or credit programs targeted toward small businesses. We find that the redistributive impact of microfinance is stronger in general equilibrium than in partial equilibrium, but the impact on aggregate...

Aggregate productivity growth in the U.S. has slowed down since the 2000s. We quantify the importance of differential productivity growth across occupations and across industries, and the rise of computers since the 1980s, for the productivity slowdown. Complementarity across occupations and...

Why doesn't capital flow into fast-growing countries? In this paper, we provide a quantitative framework incorporating heterogeneous producers and underdeveloped domestic financial markets to study the joint dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) and capital flows. When an unexpected...

We construct a quantitative model of an economy hit by an epidemic. People differ by age and skill, and choose occupations and whether to commute to work or work from home, to maximize their income and minimize their fear of infection. Occupations differ by wage, infection risk, and the...

We propose a simulated maximum likelihood estimator for dynamic models based on non-parametric kernel methods. Our method is designed for models without latent dynamics from which one can simulate observations but cannot obtain a closed-form representation of the likelihood function. Using the...

We propose a simulated maximum likelihood estimator (SMLE) for general stochastic dynamic models based on nonparametric kernel methods. The method requires that, while the actual likelihood function cannot be written down, we can still simulate observations from the model. From the simulated...

This paper finds that reforms introduced by the IMF to promote transparency have created more informed markets and reduced borrowing costs for those emerging market countries that volunteered for them. Using a quarterly panel estimation with fixed country effects, we find that sovereign spreads...