This paper uses a new administrative dataset of students at a large university matched to courses and instructors to analyze the importance of teacher quality at the postsecondary level. Instructors are matched to both objective and subjective characteristics of teacher quality to estimate the...

This article studies a continuous time principal-agent problem of a firm whose cash flows are determined by the manager's unobserved effort. The firm's cash flows are further subject to persistent and publicly observable shocks that are beyond the manager's control. While standard contracting...

We study non-contractible intangible investment in a dynamic agency model with multitasking. The manager's short-term task determines current performance which deteriorates with investment in the firm's future profitability, his long-term task. The optimal contract dynamically balances...

This paper investigates the potential reasons for the surprisingly different labor market performance of the United States, Canada, Germany, and several other OECD countries during and after the Great Recession of 2008-09. Unemployment rates did not change substantially in Germany, increased and...

The focus of this paper is on the steady state of a two-sector economy with undirected search where employed and unemployed workers can search for jobs, both within a sector and between the sectors. As in the one-sector model, on-the-job search generates wage dispersion among homogeneous...

This paper uses detailed administrative data from one of the largest community colleges in the United States to quantify the extent to which academic performance depends on students being of similar race or ethnicity to their instructors. To address the concern of endogenous sorting, we use both...