This paper studies the design of unemployment insurance when neither the searching effort nor the savings of an unemployed agent can be monitored. If the principal could monitor the savings, the optimal policy would leave the agent savings-constrained. With a constant absolute risk-aversion...

We study how best to reward innovators whose work builds on earlier innovations. Incentives to innovate are obtained by offering innovators the opportunity to profit from their innovations. Since innovations compete, awarding rights to one innovator reduces the value of the rights to prior...

Statistical discrimination in the labor market occurs when employers have only incomplete information about workers' productivity, and use aggregate statistics to make their decisions. This dissertation expands our understanding of how statistical discrimination is generated, explains how public...

We simulate a spatial behavioral model of the diffusion of an infection to understand the role of geographical characteristics: the number and distribution of outbreaks, population size, density, and agents' movements. We show that several invariance properties of the SIR model with respect to...

We compare two established jury selection procedures meant to safeguard against the inclusion of biased jurors that are also perceived as causing minorities to be under-represented in juries. The Strike and Replace procedure presents potential jurors one-by-one to the parties, while the Struck...

We estimate the effects of obesity on wages accounting for the workers' sorting into jobs requiring different levels of personal interactions in the workplace. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 combined with detailed information about jobs from O*Net, we find a wage...

We develop a model of trade between identical countries. Workers endogenously acquire skills that are imperfectly observed by firms, who therefore use aggregate country investment as the prior when evaluating workers. This creates an informational externality interacting with general equilibrium...

We estimate the effects of obesity on wages accounting for the workers' sorting into jobs requiring different levels of personal interactions in the workplace. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 combined with detailed information about jobs from O*Net, we find a wage...

We simulate a spatial behavioral model of the diffusion of an infection to understand the role of geographical characteristics: the number and distribution of outbreaks, population size, density, and agents' movements. We show that several invariance properties of the SIR model with respect to...

We simulate a spatial behavioral model of the diffusion of an infection to understand the role of geographical characteristics: the number and distribution of outbreaks, population size, density, and agents' movements. We show that several invariance properties of the SIR model with respect to...