Are fixed costs to using financial intermediation quantitatively important in explaining income differences across-countries? I introduce fixed costs into an entrepreneurship model with financial frictions where agents are heterogeneous in their financial assets, entrepreneurial ability and...

Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) we estimate quarterly labor earnings risk across 21 industries of the US economy. We document a significant and positive association between earnings risk (both permanent and transitory) and average log-earnings across industries. The...

We consider a matching model of employment with wages that are flexible for new hires, but sticky within matches. We depart from standard treatments of sticky wages by allowing worker effort to respond to the wage being too high or low, rendering the effective wage (wage divided by output) more...

We present empirical evidence and a theoretical argument that uncertainty shocks act like a negative aggregate demand shock, which raises unemployment and lowers inflation. We measure uncertainty using survey data from the United States and the United Kingdom. We estimate the macroeconomic...

We study a political economy model of entry barriers. Each period the policymaker determines whether to impose a high barrier on entry, and the special interest groups try to influence the policymaker's decision. Entry is accompanied by creative destruction— when many new firms enter, old...

This paper explores price formation in environments with multidimensional private information. Asset sellers are informed both about their need to raise cash and about the quality of the asset they are selling. Asset buyers have rational expectations about the distribution of assets for sale at...

Substantial progress has been made in recent years in integrating optimal portfolios into (open macro) general equilibrium models using standard local approximation (perturbation) methods. We compare these perturbation-based portfolio solution methods with a global portfolio solution method to...

The U.S. economy witnessed dramatic and widespread house price inflation during the previous decade. We develop a quantitative model with incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents to investigate the impact of implicit mortgage guarantees and bailouts on house prices. In this environment, we...

We develop a model of monetary exchange in over-the-counter (OTC) markets and use it to study the effects of inflation on asset prices, as well as on standard measures of financial liquidity, such as the size of bid-ask spreads, trade volume, and the incentives of dealers to supply immediacy,...

This paper studies optimal disability and welfare benets with imperfect disability tagging. Labor supply is aected by the levels of both disability and welfare benets. The tagging process is implemented by social workers that may have some altruism toward claimants. All the individuals that are...