In the Great Contraction, regions of the United States that experienced the largest change in household debt to income ratios also experienced the largest drops in output and employment. Such output drops not only occurred for firms that sell primarily to a local region but also for regional...

offered to players in Major League Baseball, focusing on hitters.

We introduce human capital accumulation, in the form of learning by doing, in a life cycle model of career concerns and analyze how human capital acquisition a ects implicit incentives for performance. We show that standard results from the career concerns literature can be reversed in the...

In this appendix I present details of the model and of the empirical analysis and results of counterfactual experiments omitted from the paper. In Section 1 I describe a simple example that illustrates how, even in the absence of (technological) human capital acquisition, productivity shocks, or...

This paper develops and structurally estimates an equilibrium model of the labor market that integrates learning, job assignment, and human capital acquisition to account for the main patterns of job and wage mobility characteristic of careers in firms. A key innovation is the modeling of...

We consider a nonlinear pricing model, in which consumers' marginal willingness to pay and absolute ability to pay are noncontractible, to explain the nonlinearity of unit prices of basic food items (bulk discounting) in developing countries. We allow consumers to face binding budget-constraints...

This paper develops and structurally estimates a learning model in which firms acquire information about workers' ability by observing their performance over time. A firm consists of a collection of jobs which differ in the informational content of performance, as measured by the dispersion in...

We analyze a dynamic principal-agent model where an infinitely-lived principal faces a sequence of finitely-lived agents who differ in their ability to produce output. The ability of an agent is initially unknown to both him and the principal. An agent's effort affects the information on ability...

This paper investigates a learning model in which information about a worker's ability, unobserved to both the worker and the firm, can be acquired in any period by both parties by observing the worker's performance at a given task. Tasks are differentially informative about productivity: more...

The paper studies a learning model in which information about a worker's ability can be acquired symmetrically by the worker and a firm in any period by observing the worker's performance on a given task. Productivity at different tasks is assumed to be differentially sensitive to a worker's...