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...

This paper shows how the empirical implications of incomplete markets models can be assessed using the same full-information methods that are commonly used for representative agent models. It then asks what features of the microeconomic insurance arrangement are important for understanding the...

This paper estimates the impact of parents' time investment in young children, their socioeconomic status and family structure on long-term outcomes of children. We developed and estimated a model of dynastic households in which altruistic individuals choose fertility, labor supply, and time...

The flow opportunity cost of moving from unemployment to employment consists of foregone public benefits and foregone utility from non-working time relative to consumption. Recent research uses a relatively high opportunity cost to generate volatile unemployment fluctuations in search and...