Recently, a number of authors have argued that the standard search model cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies, given shocks of a plausible magnitude. We use data on the cost of vacancy creation and cyclicality of wages to identify...

We propose an extended PAYG social security system that conditions pension benefits on the aggregate wage sum and on the wage of one’s children. The latter increases parents’ incentives to provide their children with good within-family education. However, since wages depend stochastically on...

Central bankers' conventional wisdom suggests that nominal interest rates should be raised to implement a lower inflation target. In contrast, I show that the standard New Keynesian monetary model predicts that nominal interest rates should be decreased to attain this goal. Real interest rates,...

This paper asks whether tax cycles can represent the optimal policy in a model without any extrinsic uncertainty. I show, in an economy without capital and where labor is the only choice variable (a Lucas-Stokey economy), that a large class of preferences exists, where cycles are optimal, as...

We ask whether offering a menu of unemployment insurance contracts is welfare improving in a heterogeneous population. We adopt a repeated moral-hazard framework as in Shavell/Weiss (1979) supplemented by unobserved heterogeneity about agents’ job opportunities. Our main theoretical...

We ask whether offering a menu of unemployment insurance contracts is welfare-improving in a heterogeneous population. We adopt a repeated moral hazard framework as in Shavell/Weiss (1979), supplemented by unobserved heterogeneity about agents’ job opportunities. Our main theoretical...

Recently, a number of authors have argued that the standard search model cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies, given shocks of a plausible magnitude. We use data on the cost of vacancy creation and cyclicality of wages to identify...

Central bankers’ conventional wisdom suggests that nominal interest rates should be raised to implement a lower inflation target. In contrast, I show that the standard New Keynesian monetary model predicts that nominal interest rates should be decreased to attain this goal. Real interest...

We measure the effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment. We exploit the variation induced by the decision of Congress in December 2013 not to reauthorize the unprecedented benefit extensions introduced during the Great Recession. Federal benefit extensions that ranged from 0 to 47...

We exploit a policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the labor market implications of unemployment benefit extensions. In contrast to the existing literature that focused on estimating the effects of benefit duration on job search decisions by the unemployed – the micro effect...