When a seller with a single, indivisible good meets with potential buyers sequentially, the process of price determination often involves an asking price: the seller quotes a price at which he is willing to sell immediately, but he also allows bids below this price and can recall such bids after...

This paper studies the effect of screening costs on the equilibrium allocation of workers with different productivities to firms with different technologies. In the model, a worker's type is private information, but can be learned by the firm during a costly screening or interviewing process. We...

We study the relationship between wages and the number and quality of applicants that a vacancy attracts. Using data from a large US employment website, we show that higher wages attract better applicants. Surprisingly, higher wages are associated with fewer applications, and this is robust to...

This paper studies an equilibrium model of social and cognitive skills interactions in school, work and marriage. The model uses a common team production function in each sector which integrates the complementarity concerns of Becker with the task assigment and comparative advantage concerns of...

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...

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...