For decades, macroeconomists have searched for shocks that are plausible drivers of business cycles. A recent advance in this quest has been to explore uncertainty shocks. Researchers use a variety of forecast and volatility data to justify heteroskedastic shocks in a model, which can then...

We use an identified factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) to estimate the impact of monetary policy shocks on the cross-section of stock returns. Our FAVAR combines unobserved factors extracted from a large set of financial and macroeconomic indicators with the Federal Funds rate. We...

We propose an original model of human capital investments after leaving school in which individuals differ in their initial human capital obtained at school, their rate of return, their costs of human capital investments and their terminal values of human capital at retirement. We derive a...

We develop a "passive learning" model of firm entry by spin-off: firm employees leave their employer and create a new firm when (a) they learn they are good entrepreneurs (type I spin-offs) or (b) they learn their employer's prospects are bad (type II spin-offs). Our theory predicts a high...

Investment-specific technology (IST) shocks have been shown to play a significant role in explaining the business cycle dynamics of the US economy. Recently a debate has arisen over the extent to which these shocks aid our understanding of international business cycles as well. This paper...

This paper quantifies cross-country differences in early childhood human capital. I embed a standard human capital production function into a cross-country model of human capital investment and labor market outcomes. The model predicts that only some human capital investment channels generate...

We derive a simple equation to calculate the global welfare impact of the simultaneous reduction of trade costs between multiple country-pairs. Interestingly, we find that we obtain the same equation for a broad class of trade models. Moreover, balanced trade is mostly not required for the...

This paper investigates theoretically and empirically the relationship between the geographic structure of a multinational corporation and its stock market returns. We use a structural model to identify two main channels through which the fact of being a multinational firm affects returns. On...

In this paper, we ask to what extent changes to the age and sex structure of the population account for the changes in the marriage behavior observed in the United States in the last century (from 1900 to 1980). The decrease in mortality, especially for women, and the changes in immigration...

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...