Requiring agents with private information to select from a menu of incentive schedules can yield efficiency gains. It will do so if, and only if, agents will receive further private information after selecting the incentive schedule but before taking the action that determines where on the...

In an earlier paper, we showed that the value of shadow prices depends on how the government contemplates re- equilibrating the economy to the perturbation associated with any project, except in the extreme case where the government has chosen all policy instruments optimally. Only under...

We propose and study properties of several estimators of variance decomposition in the local-projections framework. We find for empirically relevant sample sizes that, after being bias corrected with bootstrap, our estimators perform well in simulations. We also illustrate the workings of our...

We outline a method to provide advice on optimal monetary policy while taking policymakers' judgment into account. The method constructs Optimal Policy Projections (OPPs) by extracting the judgment terms that allow a model, such as the Federal Reserve Board's FRB/US model, to reproduce a...

A popular view about social security, dating back to its early days of inception, is that it is a means for young, unemployed workers to 'purchase' jobs from older, employed workers. The question we ask is: Can social security, by encouraging retirement and hence creating job vacancies for the...

This paper uses detailed data on retail pharmacy transactions to make inferences about the nature and intensity of consumer search for prescription drugs. Prescription prices exhibit patterns that should, in principle, induce search: in particular, prices vary widely across stores, and stores'...

This paper studies the assignment of heterogeneous workers to heterogeneous jobs in the presence of coordination frictions. Firms offer human-capital-contingent wages, workers observe these and apply for a job. In a symmetric equilibrium, identical workers use identical mixed strategies in...

This paper explains the divergent behavior of European and US unemployment rates using a job market matching model of the labor market with an interaction between shocks and institutions. It shows that a reduction in TFP growth rates, an increase in real interest rates, and an increase in tax...

When match formation is costly and wage determination is decentralized, privately optimal investments in job and worker quality diverge from socially efficient outcomes. To explore this issue, I consider search equilibrium environments with endogenous quality distributions for jobs and workers....

This paper constructs a tractable general equilibrium model of search with risk-aversion. An increase in risk-aversion reduces wages, unemployment, and investment. Unemployment insurance (UI) has the reverse effect due to market generated moral hazard: insured workers seek high wage jobs with...