How does technological progress in financial intermediation affect the economy? To address this questiona costly-state verification framework is embedded into a standard growth model. In particular, financialintermediaries can invest resources to monitor the returns earned by firms. The...

Consumer bankruptcies rose sharply over the last 20 years in the U.S. economy. During the same period, there was impressive technological progress in the information sector. This paper provides a theory to understand and quantify the role of improvements in information technologies in consumer...

To address how technological progress in financial intermediation affects the economy, a costly-state verification framework is embedded into the standard growth model. The framework has two novel features. First, firms differ in the risk/return combinations that they offer. Second, the efficacy...

This paper considers the problem of optimal unemployment insurance (UI) in a repeated moral hazard framework. Unlike existing literature, unemployed individuals can secretly participate in a hidden labor market. This extension modifies the standard problem in three dimensions. First, it imposes...

This paper considers the problem of optimal unemployment insurance in a moral hazard framework. Unlike existing literature, unemployed workers can secretly participate in a hidden labor market; as a consequence, an endogenous lower bound for promised utility preventing "immiserization" arises....

This article studies the U.S. establishment-size distribution from 1974–2006. The main findings are: (i) the size of the “representative” establishment is relatively constant; (ii) the size distribution has become slightly more evenly distributed; (iii) the relative stability of aggregate...

How important is financial development for economic development? A costly state verification model of financial intermediation is presented to address this question. The model is calibrated to match facts about the U.S. economy, such as intermediation spreads and the firm-size distribution for...

This paper develops a model in which it is possible to evaluate alternatives of human capital financing. The alternative systems under discussion are: total feeing; graduates taxes and uniform taxes (this can be associated to the scheme presently used in the Argentina universitary system)....

Since the probability of finding a job is affected not only by individual effort but also by the aggregate state of the economy, designing unemployment insurance payments conditional on the business cycle could be valuable. This paper answers a fundamental question related to this issue: How...

Emerging market economies typically exhibit a procyclical fiscal policy: public expenditures rise (fall) in economic expansions (recessions), whereas tax rates rise (fall) in bad (good) times. Additionally, the business cycle of these economies is characterized by countercyclical default risk....