Why is unemployment higher for young individuals than for the old? Why are business cycle fluctuations in employment more pronounced for the young than for the old? We address these questions in the context of a search-and-matching model of the labor market that features learning about...

Why is unemployment higher for younger individuals? We address this question in a frictional model of the labor market that features learning about occupational fit. In order to learn the occupation in which they are most productive, workers sample occupations over their careers. Because young...

The search-and-matching model of the labor market fails to match two important business cycle facts: (i) a high volatility of unemployment relative to labor productivity, and (ii) a mild correlation between these two variables. We address these shortcomings by focusing on technological...

The objective of this paper is to address the questions what explains the cross-country variation in mobility (agents that change both jobs and residence), and is labor mobility related to tenure mode? The basic framework of the model is where the economy consists of two symmetric locations;...

Why is unemployment higher for younger individuals? We address this question in a frictional model of the labor market that features learning about occupational fit. In order to learn the occupation in which they are most productive, workers sample occupations over their careers. Because young...

We use a very standard life-cycle growth model, in which individuals have a labor-leisure choice in each period of their lives, to prove that an optimizing government will almost always find it optimal to tax or subsidize interest income. The intuition for our result is straightforward. In a...

We document that home ownership of households with "heads" aged 25 - 44 years fell substantially between 1980 and 2000 and recovered only partially during the 2001-2005 housing boom. The 1980-2000 decline in young home ownership occurred as improvements in mortgage opportunities made it easier...

Residential investment before the mid 1980s was very volatile and since then it has been much less volatile. Before the 1980s mortgage markets were highly regulated and mortgage opportunities were limited, while large numbers of baby-boom households were acquiring their first house. Since 1980...

When young individuals face binding debt constraints, their human capital investments will be insufficiently financed by private creditors. If generations overlap, then a well-designed fiscal policy may be able to improve human capital investments by replacing missing capital markets with an...