In this paper, we examine relationship between giving to family, and community institutions, within and across generations, a previously unexplored subject. We investigate the relationship between these two types of transfer networks using new data from the Indonesian Family Life Surveys (IFLS)....

We study how share repurchases affect the ownership stake of outside blockholders in 950 publicly-traded US corporations from 1996 through 2001, using a control function approach to address the possible endogeneity of repurchases. We find that share repurchases tend to make outside ownership...

Financial crises cause a significant reallocation of labor as relative prices change drastically and economies confront a variety of shocks. Using household survey data for Mexico, we show that gross and net labor flows between industries and occupations increase substantially during the 1994-95...

The financial crises or “sudden stops” of the last decade in emerging economies were accompanied by a large fall in total factor productivity. In this paper we explore the role of financial frictions in exacerbating the misallocation of resources and explaining this drop in TFP. We build a...

We examine whether advertising increases household debt by studying the initial expansion of television in the 1950’s. Exploiting the idiosyncratic spread of television across markets, we use microdata from the Survey of Consumer Finances to test whether households with early access to...

We study a labor market in which principals and agents must search for a trading partner, and agents have private information about the value of a match. We show that competitive pressure can induce agents to lie and overstate the value of the match. This leads to insufficient frictional...

Case studies show that corporate managers seek financial independence to avoid interference by outside financiers. We incorporate this financial xenophobia as a fixed cost in a simple dynamic model of financing and investment. To avoid refinancing in the future, the firm alters its behavior...

A number of inflation targeting central banks operate under provisions that allow for increased flexibility when faced with large supply shocks. These so-called escape clauses, however, are usually hard to interpret and discretionary in nature. This paper argues that a practical and more viable...

Rational expectations models of staggered price/wage contracts have failed to replicate the observed persistence in inflation and unemployment during disinflation periods. The current literature on this persistency puzzle has focused on augmenting the nominal contract model with imperfect...

We present a framework to revisit and reframe some important debates over the nature of free versus unfree labor and the economic consequences of emancipation. We use a simple general equilibrium model in which labor can be either free or coerced and where land and labor will be exchanged on...