U.S. business investment has taken a serious toll during the global financial crisis and also in the recovery phase investment did not pick up as expected. What is surprising is that the alleged investment slowdown happened at a time of record corporate profits and retained earnings, highly...

We study global properties of the equilibrium set of economies with a continuous consumption space. This framework is important in intertemporal allocation problems (continuous or infinite time), financial markets with uncertainty (continuous states of nature) and commodity differentiation. We...

We provide simple examples to illustrate how wealth-driven selection works in asset markets. Our examples deliver both good and bad news. The good news is that if individual assets demands are expressed as a fractions of wealth to be invested in each asset, e.g. because traders maximize an...

Short lived arbitrage opportunities arise when prices adjust with a lag to new information. They are toxic because they expose dealers to the risk of trading at stale quotes. Hence, theory implies that more frequent toxic arbitrage opportunities and a faster arbitrageurs' response to these...

Despite the idea of a sustainable/equilibrium number of businesses being at the core of economics, very little empirical analysis has looked at how the adjustment process in disequilibrium works. This paper investigates how business establishment/plant entry and exit are affected by...

I use the Prescott (1975) hotels model to explain variations in price dispersion across goods sold by supermarkets in Chicago. I extend the theory to accounts for the monopoly power of chains and for non-shoppers. The main empirical finding is that the effect of demand uncertainty on price...

We investigate how Japanese men aged 60-74 adjust their workforce attachment after beginning to receive a public pension. Men who were employees at age 54 gradually move to part-time work or retire after beginning to receive pension benefits; those who continue working are more likely to be...

In the debate over immigration reform, it is frequently asserted that immigrants take jobs that U.S. natives do not want. Using data from the 2000 Census merged with O*NET data on occupation characteristics, I show that the jobs held by immigrants are more physically arduous than the jobs held...

This paper documents variation in working conditions among workers in the United States, presents new estimates of how workers value these conditions, and assesses the impact of working conditions on estimates of the wage structure and inequality. We use evidence from a series of stated...