Labor's share of income has attracted interest in recent years reflecting its apparent decline. These falls, witnessed across many countries, are usually deemed undesirable. Any such assertion, however, begs the question of what is the socially optimal labor share. We address this question using...

We evaluate the goal of maximizing the number of individually rational assignments. We show that it implies incentive, fairness, and implementation impossibilities. Despite that, we present two classes of mechanisms that maximize assignments. The first are Pareto efficient, and undominated - in...

The growing finance wage premium is related to a modest net reallocation of skilled workers from non-finance sectors into finance in a broad sample of 24 countries over 35 years. The reallocation is higher when the finance wage premium grows faster than the contribution of the financial sector...

Aggregate wages display little cyclicality compared to what a standard model would predict. Wage rigidities are an obvious candidate but a recent strand of the literature has emphasized the need to take into account the growing importance of worker composition effects during downturns. With...

We propose a mechanism via which a decline in the share of young workers slows employment growth in expanding sectors, and exacerbates sectoral reallocation costs. To quantify this mechanism, we develop a search model with perpetual youth, three sectors and endogenous separations of worker-firm...

According to the "cleansing hypothesis", recessions are periods in which productivity-enhancing reallocation intensifies, shifting resources away from less efficient to more efficient firms at a greater pace. Does the Great Recession of 2008-2010 fit this view? We address this question, studying...

This paper explores the role for specific structural distortions in explaining Mexico's weak productivity growth through the resource misallocation channel. The paper makes two contributions. First, we validate the approach of measuring misallocation indirectly (Hsieh and Klenow, 2009) by...

How should a group of people decide to allocate a task that has to be done but is not adequately rewarded? This paper finds an optimal mechanism for the private provision of a public service in an environment without monetary transfers. All members of the group have the same cost of providing...