We assess the importance of land misallocation for productivity in agriculture using a quantitative model and detailed household-level data from Malawi. The land market is largely underdeveloped in Malawi as the vast majority of land is transmitted by inheritance, almost none of the land is...

We construct a panel data of income and consumption of Chinese households from 1989 to 2009 from the publicly available China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). We use the Nutrition Survey from the CHNS, that has a detailed account of the dietary information at the household level, to construct...

In this paper, we use an extended version of the neoclassical multi-country growth model to explore the efficiency in the allocation of physical capital across countries. In our framework, the observed marginal product of capital (MPK) can differ across countries because of two different...

This paper studies the maturity, timing and relative size of repayments for sovereign debt. Using Bloomberg bond data for emerging economies, we document that sovereigns issue debt with shorter maturity but more back-loaded repayments during downturns. To account for this pattern, we study a...

We analyze the optimal capital structure and investment strategy of banks and other financial institutions. We develop conditions under which banks optimally choose a fragile capital structure that is subject to runs. We show that when bank depositors have limited ability to commit to long-term...

The leading theories on monetary policy non-neutrality require some degree of price rigidity, which is often introduced by assuming fixed costs of price adjustment, also known as menu costs. Empirical evidence on the existence of such menu costs is scarce. Using weekly data on prices, costs and...

We construct a microfounded, dynamic version of the IS-LM-Phillips curve model by adding two elements to the money-in-the-utility-function model of Sidrauski (1967). First, real wealth enters the utility function. The resulting Euler equation describes consumption as a decreasing function of the...

International trade and the internal movement of goods and people are closely related. China – increasingly open and with massive internal migration flows – provides an ideal setting to study these interrelationships. We develop a general equilibrium model of internal and external...

We develop a dynamic nonlinear, noisy REE model of credit risk pricing un- der dispersed information that can theoretically and quantitatively account for the credit spread puzzle. The first contribution is a sharp analytical characteri- zation of the dynamic REE equilibrium and its comparative...

A dynamic multi-sector model with both net and excess mobility is developed to quantify the determinants of the canonical increasing wage-tenure profile. The model distinguishes between three potential factors: sector-specific skill accumulation, sector-specific shocks, and dynamic worker-sector...