This result would seem to imply that the more members on a committee the lower the average search duration. It turns out that this does not immediately follow, and in fact, the average search duration may increase as the committee grows in size. Thus, we cannot simply compare thresholds to...

We consider a housing market with large numbers of buyers and sellers. Sellers differ in their reservation prices; buyers are ex ante identical. In the first stage of the game, each seller posts an asking price. Next, each buyer, after observing all asking prices, chooses a house to visit. Upon...

We study a stylized theory of the volatility reduction in the U.S. after 1984---the Great Moderation---which attributes part of the stabilization to less volatile shocks and another part to more difficult inference on the part of Bayesian households attempting to learn the latent state of the...

Set-asides and subsidies are used extensively in government procurement and natural resource sales. Economic theory is ambiguous on how such policies affect both auction participation and auction prices. We study the use of these policies, targeted at small businesses, in the context of U.S....

In the political debate people express the idea that immigrants are good because they can help pay for the old. The paper explores this idea in a dynamic political-economy setup. For this purpose we develop an OLG political economy model of social security and migration. We characterize sub-game...

In the last century, the evolution of female labor force participation has been S-shaped: It rose slowly at first, then quickly, and has leveled off recently. Central to this dramatic rise has been the entry of women with young children. We argue that this S-shaped dynamic came from generations...

We show that dependence on foreign energy can increase economic instability by raising the likelihood of equilibrium indeterminacy, hence making fluctuations driven by self-fulfilling expectations easier to occur. This is demonstrated in a standard neoclassical growth model. Calibration...

This paper proposes a theory of educational attainment differences across U.S. metropolitan areas. The theory is motivated by the finding that employment in business services predicts more than 70% of the observed cross-city variation in education. In the model, agglomeration economies in the...

The analysis will be carried out in a relatively simple set-up, where the various effects of social security, on the prices of long-lived assets and the stock of capital, and hence on output, wages and risky rates of returns, can be clearly identified.