We estimate the volatility of plant–level idiosyncratic shocks in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Our measure of volatility is the variation in Revenue Total Factor Productivity which is not explained by either industry– or economy–wide factors, or by establishments’ characteristics....

The baby-boom and subsequent baby-bust have shaped much of the history of the second half of the 20th century; yet it is still largely unclear what caused them. This paper presents a new unified explanation of the fertility Boom-Bust that links the latter to the Great Depression and the...

Which countries find it optimal to form an economic union? We emphasize the risk-sharing benefits of economic integration. Consider an endowment world economy model, where international financial markets are incomplete and contracts not enforceable. A union solves both frictions among member...

This paper explores situations where tenants in public houses, in a specific neighborhood, are given the legislated right to buy the houses they live in or can choose to remain in their houses and pay the regulated rent. This type of legislation has been passed in many European countries in the...

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an elementary introduction to the nonrenewable resource model with multiple demand curves. The theoretical literature following Hotelling (1931) assumed that all energy needs are satisfied by one type of resource (e.g. "oil"), extractible at different...

A measure of association is row-size invariant if it is unaffected by the mutliplication of all entries in a row of a cross-classi…cation table by a same positive number. It is class-size invariant if it is unaffected by the mutliplication of all entries in a class (i.e., a row or a column). We...

We study the evolution of educational attainment of the 1932–1972 cohorts using a calibrated model of investment in human capital with heterogeneous learning ability. The inter-cohort variation in schooling is driven by changes in skill prices, tuition, and education quality over time, and...

We generalize the classical expected-utility criterion by weakening transitivity to Suzumura consistency. In the absence of full transitivity, reflexivity and completeness no longer follow as a consequence of the system of axioms employed and a richer class of rankings of probability...

We provide a representation theorem for risk measures satisfying (i) monotonicity; (ii) positive homogeneity; and (iii) translation invariance. As a simple corollary to our theorem, we obtain the usual representation of coherent risk measures (i.e., risk measures that are, in addition,...

We study the simple model of assigning indivisible and heterogenous objects (e.g., houses, jobs, offices, etc.) to agents. Each agent receives at most one object and monetary compensations are not possible. For this model, known as the house allocation model, we characterize the class of rules...