Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being bigger for non-college educated individuals versus college educated ones. Divorce has increased, more so for the non-college educated vis-à-vis the college educated. Additionally, assortative mating has risen; i.e., people are more likely to...

In the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, a policy called the Public-Private Investment Program for Legacy Assets (PPIP) was introduced to promote price discovery and restore liquidity in the markets for a variety of asset-backed securities. Under this program, private investors who were...

The major increase in the employment rate of married women while that of men remained almost unchanged is one of the most dramatic socioeconomic changes to have taken place during the last century. In this paper, we argue that shifts in social norms regarding household interaction in determining...

Political regimes influence the contents of teaching and the criteria used to select and evaluate students. We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree, as well as on several labor market outcomes, by exploiting the reorganization of the school...

We develop a model for analyzing the sovereign debt crises of 2010 and 2011 in such European countries as Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. The government sets its expenditure-debt policy optimally given a fixed probability of a recovery in fiscal revenues. In doing so, the government can optimally...

We use probabilistic expectations data elicited from survey respondents in rural Malawi to investigate how risky sexual behavior may be influenced by individuals’ survival expectations, which in turn depend on the perceived impact of HIV/AIDS on survival; expectations about own and...

I propose a model of the housing market using a search framework with asymmetric information in which sellers are unable to commit to asking prices announced ex ante. Relaxing the commitment assumption prevents sellers from using price posting as a signalling device to direct buyers’...

In this paper we estimate the effects of the business cycle on the occurrence of domestic violence. For the victims, domestic violence is among the most traumatic events conceivable. Victims (typically, children and female spouses) are often tied to the perpetrator in a relationship of economic...

The evidence shows that the short run elasticity of energy use is smaller than its long run elasticity. The recent evidence on energy use and energy prices suggests, though, that the short run response of energy use to energy prices has changed over time. Existing theories of energy use, namely,...

This paper studies the liquidity of defaultable corporate bonds that are traded in an over- the-counter secondary market with search frictions. Bargaining with dealers determines a bond’s endogenous liquidity, which depends on both the firm fundamental and the time-to-maturity of the...