Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is about twice as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30 percent. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and...

The pace of job reallocation has declined in all U.S. sectors since 2000. In standard models, aggregate job reallocation depends on (a) the dispersion of idiosyncratic productivity shocks faced by businesses and (b) the marginal responsiveness of businesses to those shocks. Using several novel...

The rapid growth of US financial services coupled with rapid increases in wealth inequality have been focusing policy debate on the function of the financial sector and on its social desirability as a whole. I propose a heterogeneous agent model with asymmetric information and matching frictions...

Despite being based on sound principles, the original Markowitz portfolio allocation theory cannot produce sound allocations, and restrictions or modifications need to be imposed from outside the theory in order to obtain meaningful portfolios. This is unsatisfactory, and the reasons for this...