The micro evidence indicates that small firms grow faster than big firms. I argue that this relationship between the expected growth rate of a firm and its size may provide a micro foundation for the well-known high degree of persistence of shocks to aggregate output. The logic goes as follows....

This paper proposes a model of endogenous growth where innovating requires both researchers, who produce inventions, and entrepreneurs who implement them. As research and entrepreneurship compete in the allocation of aggregate resources, the relation between growth and research effort is...

We argue that US welfare would rise if unemployment insurance were increased for younger and decreased for older workers. This is because the young tend to lack the means to smooth consumption during unemployment and want jobs to accumulate high-return human capital. So unemployment insurance is...

We consider a competitive equilibrium growth model where technological progress is embodied into new jobs that are assigned to workers of different skills. In every period workers decide whether to actively participate in the labor market and if so how many hours to work on the job. Balanced...

Starting in the 1970's, wage inequality and the number of hours worked by employed U.S. prime-age male workers have both increased. We argue that these two facts are related. We use a labour market model with on-the-job search where by working longer hours individuals acquire greater skills....

We document that the fraction of entrepreneurs who work in the region where they were born is significantly higher than the corresponding fraction for dependent workers. This difference is more pronounced in more developed regions and positively related to the degree of local financial...

Social contacts help workers to find jobs, but those jobs need not be in the occupations where workers are most productive. Hence social contacts can generate mismatch between a worker’s occupational choice and their comparative productive advantage. Thus economies with dense social networks...

We analyze the effects of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks on hours and output. Long cycles in hours are captured in a variety of ways. Hours robustly fall in response to neutral shocks and robustly increase in response to investment specific shocks. The percentage of the...

Several imperfections can prevent entrepreneurs from diversifying away the idiosyncratic risk of their business. As a result idiosyncratic risk discourages entrepreneurial activity and hinders growth, with the effects being stronger in economies with lower risk diversification opportunities. In...