This paper presents evidence that firms' patents, profits and market value are systematically related to thequot;technological positionquot; of firms' research programs. Further, firms are seen to quot;movequot; in technology space in response to the pattern of contemporaneous profits at...

This dissertation consists of three chapters studying different issues related to self-employment and entrepreneurship. The first chapter studies the effects of labor market frictions and credit constraints in an economy with self-employment. Two types of self-employed workers emerge in the...

Recent estimates of the intergenerational correlation of income in the United States are centered around 0.6. Existing empirical work is only able to explain about half of this correlation. The first chapter of this dissertation provides a behavioral explanation that accounts for almost half of...

Castro and Coen-Pirani (2008) document that aggregate skilled hours and employment both became more volatile after the mid-1980s, in contrast to the simultaneous volatility decline of most aggregates, including overall hours and employment and unskilled hours and employment. In chapter 1, I...

This note conducts a simple test for myopia and liquidity constraints in aggregate U.S. consumption. The test exploits the fact that, under myopia, consumption should be equally sensitive to predictable income declines and increases, while under liquidity constraints consumption should be more...

The correlation between instruments and explanatory variables is a key determinant of the performance of the instrumental variables estimator. The R² from regressing the explanatory variable on the instrument vector is a useful measure of relevance in univariate models, but can be misleading...