This paper analyzes the optimal cyclical behavior of labor market policies in an economy with asset and labor market frictions. The policies of interest include unemployment insurance (UI) and employment protection (EP). In addition to their supply-side effects, labor market policies affect the...

This paper studies the importance of idiosyncratic endowment shocks for aggregate asset prices in continuous time. My generalized framework accommodates jumps and heterogeneous recursive preferences. I show that countercyclical cross-sectional risk is irrelevant to risk premia if and only if all...

The thesis developed in this paper is that contrary to the claims of its proponents, the main supply-side consequence of neoliberalism was to zap labour, institutionalize worker insecurity, and install an `incomes policy based on fear' in the US economy. Like any successful incomes policy, this...

This paper models the macroeconomic and distributional consequences of lockdown shocks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The model features heterogeneous life-cycle households, labor market search and matching frictions, and multiple industries of employment. We calibrate the model to data from New...

The paper documents skill heterogeneity in hours and expenditures on market work, home production, and leisure between 2003 to 2018 by using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and the Consumer Expenditures Survey (CEX). The purpose is to infer the labor wedge by adding three margins...

This paper demonstrates that credit reporting -- banks observing households' default histories -- can cause slow recoveries of housing prices and employment from mortgage crises. Comparing credit cycles with and without credit reporting and capturing the impact of mortgage default on employment...

We build a New Keynesian business-cycle model with rich household heterogeneity. A central feature is that matching frictions render labor-market risk countercyclical and endogenous to monetary policy. Our main result is that a majority of households prefer substantial stabilization of...

When the economy is in a liquidity trap and households have a precautionary motive to save against unemployment risk, adverse demand shocks cause severe deflationary spirals and output contractions. In this context, we study the implications of optimal monetary policy, which consists of keeping...

An informal model is described that leads to multiple macroeconomic equilibria as a consequence of random variation in the relative amounts of technological change for new and existing goods. The novel observation is that the rate of introduction and market penetration of new goods vis-a-vis...

In this paper, I present a theory of dynamic economic growth, business cycles, and asset pricing that integrates (1) Marx's idea (and emphasized by Klein) of a two-class heterogeneity of the ownership structure of physical capital and human capital in a capitalist society, (2) Keynes' idea of...