An empirically founded and widely established driving force in opinion dynamics is homophily i.e. the tendency of "birds of a feather" to "flock together". The closer our opinions are the more likely it is that we will interact and converge. Models using these assumptions are called bounded...

Bivariate duration data frequently arise in economics, biostatistics and other areas. In "bivariate frailty models", dependence between the frailties (i.e., unobserved determinants) induces dependence between the durations. Using notions of quadrant dependence, we study restrictions that this...

For a large set of countries, we document how the labor earnings inequality varies with GDP per capita. As countries get richer, the mean-to-median ratio and the Gini coefficient decline. Yet, this decline masks divergent patterns: while inequality at the top of the earnings distribution falls,...

Occupational specificity of human capital motivates an important role of occupational reallocation for the economy's response to shocks and for the dynamics of inequality. We introduce occupational mobility, through a random choice model with dynamic value function optimization, into a...

This paper revisits the question of how trade openness affects labor market outcomes in a developing country setting. We explore the fact that plants face varying degrees of exposure to global markets and to the enforcement of labor market regulations, and rely on Brazil's currency crisis in...

Aggregate wages display little cyclicality compared to what a standard model would predict. Wage rigidities are an obvious candidate but a recent strand of the literature has emphasized the need to take into account the growing importance of worker composition effects during downturns. With...

We propose occupational decisions of heterogeneous individuals as an alternative mechanism of explaining the distribution of firm productivities emphasized by empirical studies. Thus, we integrate the frameworks of Melitz (2003), and of Manasse and Turrini (2001) that establish the theoretical...

We analyze the role of optimal income taxation across different local labor markets. Should labor in large cities be taxed differently than in small cities? We find that a planner who needs to raise revenue and is constrained by free mobility of labor across cities does not choose equal taxes...