China's gradualistic approach allowed the government to learn how the economy reacts to small policy changes, and to adjust its reforms before implementing them in full. With fully developed financial markets, however, private actors' may front-run future policy changes making it impossible for...

We study the macroeconomic consequences of financial market concentration in a complete markets economy with production. We propose a theory in which differences in preferences, productivity, and risk exposure generate gains from trade, but these gains are not fully realized because some large...

In the presence of moral hazard and costly information acquisition, we show that absolute performance pay and benchmarking naturally arise as part of the contract between investors and active managers. The commonality in compensation incentives across funds, however, gives rise to externalities....

Using data from Glassdoor, we show that firms transmit productivity shocks to workers through performance pay. Performance pay responds more than base to industry shocks, falling (rising) 17% in Finance (Information Technology) after the recent financial crisis. At the regional level,...

Anxiety during an epidemic has micro and macroeconomic consequences. I capture such anxiety in a macroeconomic setting in which heterogeneous households are uncertainty averse toward both individual and aggregate health outcomes. Fear of individual infection increases precautionary savings and...

In the presence of informational frictions, bond markets aggregate the private information of firms and intermediaries, and bond prices serve as signals about the financial sector and the real economy. Such frictions amplify the credit constraints faced by intermediaries, depressing firm...

We develop a model to analyze information aggregation and learning in housing markets. In the presence of pervasive informational frictions, housing prices serve as important signals to households and capital producers about the economic strength of a neighborhood. Our model provides a novel...

By exploiting variation in state capital gains taxation as an instrument, we analyze the economic consequences of housing speculation during the U.S. housing boom in the 2000s. We find that housing speculation, anchored, in part, on extrapolation of past housing price changes, led not only to...

We model a cryptocurrency as membership in a decentralized digital platform developed to facilitate transactions between users of certain goods or services. The rigidity induced by the cryptocurrency price having to clear membership demand with supply of token by speculators, especially with...

By exploiting variation in state capital gains taxation as an instrument, we analyze the economic consequences of housing speculation during the U.S. housing boom in the 2000s. We find that housing speculation, anchored, in part, on extrapolation of past housing price changes, led not only to...