In this paper, we consider a labor market in which workers differ in their abilities and jobs differ in their skill requirements. We take the distribution of worker abilities as given (a fraction p of the workers is low-skill, a fraction 1-p is high-skill), but we model the determination of...

We study the effectiveness of mediators in situations of conflict. In a game of cheap talk a principal may employ a mediator whose task is to gather information and make non--binding proposals. We show that mediators facilitate information transmission and are helpful if and only if the...

No abstract.

This paper finds that the predicted unemployment rate in a community increases dramatically when the fraction of neighborhood residents with college degrees drops below twenty percent. This threshold behavior provides empirical support for ``epidemic'' theories of inner-city unemployment. Using...

In this paper we consider a class of structural econometric models in which the distribution of the endogenous variables can be defined as the solution of a fixed-point problem. We propose a two-stage estimator which avoids repeated solution of the fixed point problem. The idea behind our...

No abstract.

Empirical studies have shown that, for many countries, the distribution of wealth is much more concentrated than the one of labor earnings and that households with higher levels of lifetime income have higher lifetime saving rates. Previous models have had difficulty in generating these...

We exploit an unusual policy reform which had the effect of reducing the direct cost of schooling in Ireland in the early 1970's. This gave rise to an increased level of schooling but with effects that vary across family background. This interaction generates a set of instrumental variables...

This paper explores the time series properties of commonly used variables in firm-level panels: sales (turnover), employment, R\&D, investment, and cash flow. We focus on two questions: 1) whether the behavior of these series is consistent with stationarity, and if so, 2) what order of...

This paper investigates the presence of bull and bear market states in stock price dynamics. A new definition of bull and bear market states based on sequences of stopping times tracing local peaks and troughs in stock prices is proposed. Duration dependence in stock prices is investigated...