Recent empirical findings on firms’ expenditure towards the creation and acquisition of knowledge goods, otherwise known as intangibles, suggest that their share in overall investment has grown considerably. Still, intangible investment is rarely present in investment models. In this paper, I...

The objectives of this study are three-fold. The first is to rebut Charles Kindleberger’s famous dictum that usury ‘belongs less to economic history than to the history of ideas’; and in particular to demonstrate that the resuscitation of the anti-usury campaign from the early 13th century...

The paper studies how high leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2007 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of the rich, a large increase in leverage for the remainder, and an eventual financial...

During the past four decades both between and within group wage inequality increased significantly in the US. I provide a microfounded justification for this pattern, by introducing private employer learning in a model of signaling with credit constraints. In particular, I show that when...

This paper studies the effect of financial booms and extreme asset valuations on the relative demand for skills and the wage structure. The substantial rise in wage inequality in the U.S. since the late 1970s has been accompanied by a major expansion of financial services, a series of asset...

What is the impact of firms' productivity shocks on workers' labor earnings? To answer this question, we propose a novel approach to identify firms' productivity shocks that combines a nonparametric production function estimation method with a set of two-way fixed effect regressions to control...

This paper proposes a model that, although among the first to explain minority entrepreneurship in a general equilibrium framework, is simple enough to yield closed-form solutions. Minorities may face higher entry costs and their distribution of management skills may be less advantageous. A...

This paper considers a world of symmetric countries with two factors of production and two sectors. Outputs of the two sectors are imperfect substitutes and the sectors differ in relative factor intensity. Each sector contains a continuum of heterogeneous firms that produce differentiated goods...

The gender pay gap (GPG) remains a persistent phenomenon in contemporary labor markets. Despite a vast body of research examining its causes, as of today, unequal labor market power resources between men and women have remained an underappreciated factor in the literature. Drawing on the...