The objective of this paper is to provide a theoretical explanation to some puzzling facts. While among American residents women, Mexicans tend to have higher fertility rates - a total fertility rate (TFR) of about 2.7 as opposed to a TFR of US born women of 2.0 - the fertility rate of Mexicans...

between social security and Medicaid. As a result of these interactions, we find that the US social security significantly lowers the cost of financing Medicaid and other welfare programs for the elderly as it reduces the fraction of households who choose to rely on means-tested transfers to...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model that tries to reconcile the observation that aggregate movements of exports and imports are "disconnected" from real exchange rate movements, while firm-level exports co-move significantly with the real exchange rate. Firms are...

This paper develops a model of marriage, labor supply, savings and divorce under limited commitment and uses it to understand the impact of major welfare reforms, including the time-limited eligibility in the TANF program. In the model, taxes and welfare can affect whether marriage and divorce...

We provide a general framework for the analysis of the dynamics of institutional change (e.g., democratization), and how this interacts with (anticipated and unanticipated) changes in the distribution of political power and changes in economic structure. We focus on the Markov voting equilibria,...

Lottery loans were widely used in the 18th century. Instead of buying a long-term bond of known face value, investors entered a lottery which determined the face value (or size) of the bond. The largest prizes were several orders of magnitude larger than the smallest (and most common). At a...

This paper documents, using county level data, some geographical features of the US business cycle over the past 30 years, with particular focus on the Great Recession. It shows that county level unemployment rates are spatially dispersed and spatially correlated, and documents how these...

Adverse selection is commonly used to explain inefficiencies in specific markets. In this paper,we incorporate an informational asymmetry into a decentralized dynamic economy and study its implications for aggregate and sector level dynamics. We show that it leads to slow moving capital, lagged...

We provide new evidence on the responsiveness of real interest rates and inflation to monetary shocks. Our identifying assumption is that the increase in the volatility of interest rate news in a 30-minute window surrounding scheduled Federal Reserve announcements arises from news about monetary...

The central explanation for how monetary policy transmits to the real economy relies critically on nominal rigidities, which form the basis of the New Keynesian (NK) framework. This paper studies a different transmission mechanism that operates even in the absence of nominal rigidities. We show...