There continues to be substantial interest in models combining heterogeneous beliefs about asset values with leverage generated by loans from pessimists to the optimistic natural buyers of the asset. This paper determines the size of the interest spread and margin on the loan as a function of...

Bank market power shapes firm investment and financing dynamics and hence affects the transmission of macroeconomic shocks. Motivated by a secular increase in the concentration of the US banking industry, I study bank market power through the lens of a dynamic general equilibrium model with...

We implement a field experiment to examine how part-time work attracts applicants with different quality and productivity levels than full-time work. In a large-scale recruitment drive for a data-entry position in Ethiopia, either a part-time or full-time job opportunity was randomly offered...

Retirement savings abandonment is a rising concern connected to defined contribution systems and default enrollment. We use tax data on Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to establish that for a recent cohort, 0.4% of retirement-age individuals abandoned an aggregate of $66 million, proxied...

We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a dynamic trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is above or below its target leverage. We provide...

Since the start of the pandemic the U.S. labor market has been characterized as being plagued by missing jobs, i.e. payroll employment has fallen more than five million jobs short of its pre-pandemic trend, and missing workers, i.e. the participation rate has declined by 1.2 percentage points: A...

We propose a macroprudential theory of foreign reserve accumulation that can rationalize the secular trends in public and private international capital flows. In middle-income countries, the increase in international reserves has been associated with elevated private capital inflows, both in the...

This paper proposes a quantitative theory of the interaction between private and public debt in an open economy. Excessive private debt increases the frequency of financial crises. During such crises the government provides fiscal bailouts financed with risky public debt. This response may cause...

Economic disruptions generally create winners and losers. The compensation problem consists of designing a reform of the existing income tax system that offsets the welfare losses of the latter by redistributing the gains of the former. We derive a formula for the compensating tax reform and its...

We use a panel of historical patent data covering a large range of countries over the past century to study the evolution of innovation across time and space and its effect on productivity. We document a substantial rise of international knowledge spillovers as measured by patent citations since...