There are large and persistent productivity differences across firms within narrowly defined industries. This is especially true in poor countries. Why do productivity differences decline as the economy develops? In this paper I propose a theory where productivity differences exist because...

Standard spatial models of candidate competition suggest that better information about the location of the median voter produce policies closer to the median voter’s ideal point. In this paper we show that more precise information about voter preferences may produce counterintuitive...

This paper measures mismatch between job-seekers and vacancies in the U.S. labor market. Mismatch is defined as the distance between the observed allocation of unemployed workers across sectors and the optimal allocation that solves a planner’s problem. The planner’s allocation...

Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very dierently. The education gender gap was eliminated and married...

We study optimal tax and educational policies in a dynamic private information economy, in which ex-ante heterogeneous individuals make an educational investment early in their life and face a stochastic wage distribution. We characterize labor and education wedges in this setting analytically...

Models of life cycle portfolio decisions with labor income uniformly predict that investors should reduce their portfolio share in stocks as they age because human capital, which acts a bond, becomes a smaller component of household total wealth. Despite the fact that the prediction rests on an...

The role of fiscal policy in DSGE models has long been ignored. Recent evidence from reduced-form VARs (Sims (2011)), event-studies (Leeper et al. (2012)) and structural models (Fernández-Vilaverde et al. (2012)) shows that information about fiscal variables can add to macroeconomic models. To...

Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being bigger for non-college educated individuals versus college educated ones. Divorce has increased, more so for the non-college educated vis-à-vis the college educated. Additionally, assortative mating has risen; i.e., people are more likely to...

In the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, a policy called the Public-Private Investment Program for Legacy Assets (PPIP) was introduced to promote price discovery and restore liquidity in the markets for a variety of asset-backed securities. Under this program, private investors who were...

The major increase in the employment rate of married women while that of men remained almost unchanged is one of the most dramatic socioeconomic changes to have taken place during the last century. In this paper, we argue that shifts in social norms regarding household interaction in determining...