According to a Survey by the Society for Human Resource Man- agement (2010), 60% of human resource representatives interviewed in 2009 indicated that the companies they worked for ran credit checks on potential employees. In this paper, we explore how credit checks (observable signals based on...

Entrepreneurship is risky; entrepreneurs forgo wages and invest their time and resources into a business with large potential gains, but uninsurable risks. It is vital to know the extent of these risks, and the insurance available against them, in order to assess corporate tax and personal...

We develop a framework to understand pre-employment credit screening through adverse selection in labor and credit markets. Workers differ in an unobservable characteristic that induces a positive correlation between labor productivity and repayment rates in credit markets. Firms therefore...

We develop a simple equilibrium model of rental markets for housing in which eviction occurs endogenously. Both landlords and renters lack commitment; a landlord evicts a delinquent tenant if they do not expect total future rent payments to cover costs, while tenants cannot commit to paying more...

We estimate an aggregate elasticity of substitution between capital and labor near or below one, which implies that capital deepening cannot explain the global decline in labor's share. Our methodology derives from transition paths in the neo-classical growth model. The elasticity of...