I propose a centralized clearinghouse for college admissions in which students can signal enthusiasm by commitment, like early-decision programs. Furthermore, students can specify financial aid in their preferences and they can be matched with multiple colleges at the same time. This...

We develop an international financial market model in which domestic and foreign residents differ in their beliefs about the information content in public signals. We determine how informational advantages by domestic (foreign) investors in the interpretation of home (foreign) public signals...

This paper provides a new estimation and solution method for a generalized class of sorting hedonic models based on discrete approximations of the distribution of housing quality. Our approach incorporates heterogeneity in preferences and treats quality as latent. Additionally, a housing market...

To detect the presence of predatory pricing, antitrust authorities routinely ask whether a firm sacrifices current profit in exchange for the expectation of higher future profit following the exit of its rival. Because predatory pricing is an inherently dynamic phenomenon, we show in this paper...

Building on Goodfriend and McCallum (2007), the paper presents a theory of money and banking in which the interbank Treasury-Bill (TED) spread (and other spreads) reflect the valuation of government bond collateral services in banking. Government debt held by households defrays the cost of...

Collaboration networks provide a method for examining the highly heterogeneous structure of collaborative communities. However, existing models of network formation do not provide a connection between observed network heterogeneity and characteristics of the individuals or communities. The model...

We examine the quantitative importance of financial market shocks in accounting for business cycle fluctuations. We emphasize the role financial markets play in reallocating funds from cash-rich, low productivity firms to cash-poor, high productivity firms. Using evidence on financial flows at...

Abstract: While many parts of the developing world have experienced “green revolutions”, agricultural productivity growth in sub-Saharan Africa has stagnated for decades. In this paper, I argue that production uncertainty is a major factor inhibiting agricultural investment in the region,...

We bring together the theories of duality and dynamic programming. We show that the dual of an additively separable dynamic optimization problem can be recursively decomposed using summaries of past Lagrange multipliers as state variables. Analogous to the Bellman decomposition of the primal...

Controlled choice over public schools attempts giving options to parents while maintaining diversity, often enforced by setting feasibility constraints with hard upper and lower bounds for each student type. We demonstrate that there might not exist assignments that satisfy standard fairness and...