This thesis contains several lines of research conducted during my four years at the European University Institute. It deals with two distinct topics in the area of recursive economies, developed in three chapters. The first chapter considers a general class of recursive models in which...

This paper extends the existing literature on optimal unemployment insurance by allowing for self-insurance; individuals may save using a one-period riskless asset, but their access to the credit market is restricted. I show that under this market arrangement, an asset based unemployment insurance...

Solving dynamic models with inequality constraints poses a challenging problem for two major reasons: dynamic programming techniques are reliable but often slow, while Euler equation based methods are fast but have problematic or unknown convergence properties. This paper attempts to bridge this...

This paper studies a model of firm-sponsored investments in general human capital. When institutional settings permit simple contractual arrangements that are consistent with at-will employment, firms invest in a worker's general skills. And when market forces discipline contracts, the...

This paper analyzes the feedback between firms' hiring decisions and the demand for their products in environments in which agents are not well insulated from the financial consequences of unemployment. In such an environment, an increase in (the chance of ) becoming unemployed increases...

Solving a workhorse incomplete markets model in continuous time is many times faster compared to its discrete time counterpart. This paper dissects the computational discrepancies and identifies the key bottlenecks. The implicit finite difference method – a commonly used tool in continuous...

We study the gains from trade in a model with oligopolistic competition, heterogeneous firms and innovation, and provide a formula to decompose the mechanism. The new insight we provide is that market concentration can be a welfare-relevant feature of market power above and beyond markup...