In France, firms that have 50 employees or more face substantially more regulation than firms that have less than 50. As a result, the size distribution of firms is visibly distorted: there are many firms with exactly 49 employees. We model the regulation as the combination of a sunk cost that...

How important is managerial talent in accounting for cross country income differences? We address this question using a model that distinguishes between workers human capital and managers human capital. In our model, the ablest people leverage their talent and this has important consequences for...

the incentive to adjust the workforce. I relax this assumption and introduce wage bargaining with multiple workers. A reduced-form empirical decomposition suggests that transitory shocks to sales have a strong effect on wages, but that permanent shocks have a very small effect on wages. I...

This paper presents a model of human capital accumulation to better understand the take-off from stagnation to growth from 1500 to 2000 AD. Finitely lived households choose the quantity and quality of children. The key ingredient of the model is a spillover from parents to children in the...

We develop and characterize analytically an investment model in discrete time with a fixed adjustment cost not proportional to existing capital and complete irreversibility that reproduces the lumpiness of investment at the micro-level. In agreement with the empirical evidence, as a firm size...

<p>We develop and solve analytically an investment model with fixed adjust-ment costs and complete irreversibility that reproduces observed investment dynamics at the micro-level. We impose a minimal set of restrictions on technology and uncertainty. Most of the results duplicate or generalize...</p>

This paper studies the dynamics of labor demand at the firm level. Recent studies emphasize the importance of non-convex components in the structure of hiring and firing costs in the form of either fixed or linear adjustment costs. Building from Cooper al. (2005) model and Rota (2004)...

In France, firms with 50 employees or more face substantially more regulation than firms with less than 50. As a result, the size distribution of firms is visibly distorted: there are many firms with exactly 49 employees. We model the regulation as a sunk cost that must be paid the first time...

This paper studies whether the Rietz-Barro "disaster" model, extended for a time-varying probability of disaster, can match the empirical evidence on predictability of stock returns. It is shown that when utility is CRRA, the model cannot replicate this evidence, regardless of parameter values....

Recent work in international finance suggests that exchange rate puzzles can be accounted for if (1) aggregate uncertainty is time-varying, and (2) countries have heterogeneous exposures to a world aggregate shock. We embed these features in a standard two-country real business cycle framework,...