This paper uses data consisting of students' strategically reported preferences and their underlying true preferences to study the course allocation mechanism used at Harvard Business School. We show that the mechanism is manipulable in theory, manipulated in practice, and that these...

This Paper introduces two complementary models of firm-specific training: an informational model and a productivity-enhancement model. In both models, market provision of firm-specific training is inefficient. The nature of the inefficiency depends, however, on the balance between the two key...

I estimate a search-and-bargaining model of a decentralized market to quantify the effects of trading frictions on asset allocations, asset prices and welfare, and to quantify the effects of intermediaries that facilitate trade. Using business-aircraft data, I find that, relative to the...

This paper studies a dynamic bargaining model with informational externalities between bargaining pairs. Two principals bargain with their respective agents about the price they will pay for their work while its cost is agents' private information and correlated between them. The principals...

In an environment in which both buyers and sellers can undertake match specific investments, the presence of market competition for matches may solve hold-up and coordination problems generated by the absence of complete contingent contracts. In particular, this Paper shows that when matching is...

This paper considers an equilibrium model of unemployment in a labour market where all vacancies are advertised in a newspaper. Unemployment occurs in occupations that are short on vacancies. New vacancies are created by entrepreneurial search and investment, so it may take some time before an...

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a network. Frictions arise if workers do not know where other workers apply to (this affects network creation) and firms do not know which candidates other firms consider (this affects network clearing). We show that those frictions and the...

Why were people so unprepared for the global financial crisis, the European debt crisis, and the Fukushima nuclear accident? To address this question, we study a model in which agents make state-contingent plans - think about actions in different contingencies - subject to the constraint that...