Using data from a variety of sources, this paper comprehensively documents the dramatic changes in the manufacturing sector and the large decline in employment rates and hours worked among prime-aged Americans since 2000. We use cross-region variation to explore the link between declining...

When is the level of entry of buyers or sellers efficient in markets with search and matching frictions? This paper generalizes the well-known Hosios condition for constrained efficiency to a wide range of dynamic search and matching environments where the expected match output depends on the...

This paper presents new evidence on the evolution of black-white earnings differences among all men at different points in the distribution. We study two dimensions of earnings gaps: the black-white difference in earnings; and the difference between a black man's position in the black earnings...

Firms and governments often use moral suasion and economic incentives to influence intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for economic activities. To investigate persistence of such interventions, we randomly assign households to moral suasion and dynamic pricing that stimulate energy conservation...

A central question in the debate over privatized Medicare is whether increased government payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans generate lower premiums for consumers or higher profits for producers. Using difference-in-differences variation brought about by a sharp legislative...

In this article, we define and propose preliminary empirical evidence for an alternative type of policy measure, which we call unconventional fiscal policy. We define unconventional fiscal policies as those policies that generate an increasing path of consumption taxes that result in households'...

We study the design of provider incentives in the post-acute care setting - a high-stakes but under-studied segment of the healthcare system. We focus on long-term care hospitals (LTCHs) and the large (approximately $13,500) jump in Medicare payments they receive when a patient's stay reaches a...

Health insurance confers benefits to the previously uninsured, including improvements in health, reductions in out-of-pocket spending, and reduced medical debt. But because the nominally uninsured pay only a small share of their medical expenses, health insurance also provides substantial...

Contrary to signaling models' central predictions, changes in profits do not empirically follow changes in dividends, and firms with the least need to signal pay the bulk of dividends. We show both theoretically and empirically that dividends signal safer, rather than higher, future profits....

This paper demonstrates that the Modigliani Miller Theorem on capital structure does in general not apply to banks when faced with endogenous liquidity risk in form of bank runs and asset illiquidity. The Modigliani Miller Theorem states that under certain assumptions, firms with different...