I develop a directed search model of the labor market in which firms choose a recruiting intensity, determining the number of applicants they will interview. Interviewing applicants is costly but reveals their productivity, allowing the firm to hire better workers. I characterize the equilibrium...

The obituary discusses why Gary Becker is one of the most successful social scientist in the second half of the twentieth century. It argues that his success was due to his ability to recognize which resources are scarce in non-market situations and environments, and to use economics to analyze...

A clear consensus has emerged that agglomeration economies are an important factor explaining why firms cluster next to each other. Yet, because of non-trivial measurement challenges, disagreement remains over the sources of these agglomeration effects. This paper is the first to present direct...

This paper considers nonparametric estimation of first-price auction models under the monotonicity restriction on the bidding strategy. Based on an integrated-quantile representation of the first-order condition, we propose a tuning-parameter-free estimator for the valuation quantile function....

We construct a new dataset using census, survey, and registry data from hundreds of sources to document a clear positive relationship between development and average establishment size in manufacturing across 134 countries. We rationalize this relationship using a standard model of reallocation...

This is a substantially revised version of an earlier Working Paper (posted in 2002, with a different title), based on much new data and other information. It re-examines Earl Hamilton’s famous 1929 thesis on ‘Profit Inflation’ and the ‘birth of modern industrial capitalism’: namely,...

Coinage debasements were a prevalent and generally very harmful feature of most economies in late-medieval western Europe, and most certainly in Burgundian Flanders (1384-1482). Flanders also experienced several economic recessions or contractions from three related sources: warfare; the...

The negotiating strategies of parties to a corporate bankruptcy are shaped by the rules and procedures of bankruptcy law. The rules have an asymmetric impact on the debtor and its creditors. To analyze the effect of this asymmetry, the paper develops a model of bankruptcy negotiation based on a...

Several recent studies have found that earnings inequality in Canada has grown considerably since the late 1970's. Using an extraordinary data base drawn from longitudinal income tax records, we decompose this growth in earnings inequality into its persistent and transitory components. We find...

This paper develops a methodology for nonparametric estimation of a polarization measure due to Anderson Ge and Leo (2006) based on kernel estimation techniques. We give the asymptotic theory of our estimator, which in some cases is non standard due to boundary value problems. We also propose a...