Do people move to cities because of marriage market considerations? In cities singles can meet more potential partners than in rural areas. Singles are therefore prepared to pay a premium in terms of higher housing prices. Once married, the marriage market benefits disappear while the housing...

There is a lively debate on the persistence of the current banking crisis' impact on GDP. Impulse Response Functions (IRF) estimated by Cerra and Saxena (2008) suggest that the effects of earlier crises were long-lasting. We show that standard estimates of IRFs are highly sensitive to...

We analyze a general search model with on-the-job search and sorting of heterogeneous workers into heterogeneous jobs. This model yields a simple relationship between (i) the unemployment rate, (ii) the value of non-market time, and (iii) the max-mean wage differential. The latter measure of...

This paper derives and estimates rules for fiscal policy that prescribe the optimal response to changes in unemployment and debt. We combine the reduced-form model of the economy from a linear VAR with a non-linear welfare function and obtain analytic solutions for optimal policy. The variables...

The direct impact of local public goods on welfare is relatively easy to measure from land rents. However, the indirect effects on home and job location, on land use, and on agglomeration benefits are hard to pin down. We develop a spatial general equilibrium model for the valuation of these...

We characterize the equilibrium of a search model with a continuum of job and worker types, wage bargaining, free entry of vacancies and on-the-job search. The decentralized economy with monopsonistic wage setting yields too many vacancies and hence too low unemployment compared to first best....

The perpetual inventory method used for the construction of education data per country leads to systematic measurement error. This paper analyses the effect of this measurement error on GDP regressions. There is a systematic difference in the education level between census data and observations...

This paper provides a new way of analyzing tenure profiles in wages, by modelling simultaneously the evolution of wages and the distribution of tenures. We develop a theoretical model based on efficient bargaining, where both log outside wage and log wage in the current job follow a random walk,...

This study documents two empirical regularities, using data for Denmark and Portugal. First, workers who are hired last, are the first to leave the firm (Last In, First Out; LIFO). Second, workers' wages rise with seniority (= a worker's tenure relative to the tenure of her colleagues). We seek...