Why do firms and workers bargain individually or collectively? I test the effect of product market competition and rents with German establishment data. Against intuition, competition and rents have opposite effects. Competition has a u-shaped effect on the probability of collective bargaining....

The U.S. minimum wage declined in real terms since the late 1970s. In the same time, the wage of the least skilled workers fell in real terms, while the wage of the highest skilled workers increased. To shed light on these issues, I use a simple model of routinization. High-ability workers,...

Do incentives and policy choices of public officials depend on whether they are appointed by an elected body or directly elected by voters? I investigate this question using the example of state grants for highly visible municipal investment projects. To attract these grants, mayors must prepare...

We investigate non-linearities in the stock return - trading volume relationship by using daily data for 16 European countries in an asymmetric vector autoregressive model. In this framework, we test for asymmetries and analyze the dynamic relationship using a simulation based procedure for...

This paper explores the role of public debt and fiscal deficits on factor productivity in an economy with credit market frictions and heterogeneous firms. When credit market conditions are sufficiently weak, low interest rates permit the government to run Ponzi schemes so that permanent primary...

In many groups heterogeneous incentives induce people to make unequal contributions to a common pool. This paper studies whether people consider the random assignment of such unequal incentives as unequal opportunities and demand more egalitarian distributions of the pool. The aggregate...

We develop and analyze a labor market model in which heterogeneous firms operate under decreasing returns and compete for labor by posting long-term contracts. Firms achieve faster growth by offering higher lifetime wages, which allows them to fill vacancies with higher probability, consistent...

We provide new evidence on the role of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in aggregate real economic activity in the US using a multiple-horizon Granger causality framework, while allowing for infrequent shifts in mean levels and growth rates of the system variables. Our empirical investigation...

In U.S. data 1981–2012, unsecured firm credit moves procyclically and tends to lead GDP, while secured firm credit is acyclical; similarly, shocks to unsecured firm credit explain a far larger fraction of output fluctuations than shocks to secured credit. In this paper we develop a tractable...