We estimate the effect of household appliance ownership on the labor force participation rate of married women using micro-level data from the 1960 and 1970 U.S. Censuses. In order to identify the causal effect of home appliance ownership on married women's labor force participation rates, our...

When markets are incomplete, shareholders typically disagree on the firm's optimal investment plan. This article studies the shareholders' preferences with respect to the firm's investment in a model with aggregate risk, incomplete markets and heterogeneous households who trade in firms' shares...

This paper proposes an explanation for why efficient reforms are not carried out when losers have the power to block their implementation, even though compensating them is feasible. We construct a signaling model with two-sided incomplete information in which a government faces the task of...

We document and discuss a dramatic change in the cyclical behavior of aggregate skilled hours since the mid-1980s. Using CPS data for 1979:1-2003:4, we find that the volatility of skilled hours relative to the volatility of GDP has nearly tripled since 1984. In contrast, the cyclical properties...

We propose an explanation for why efficient reforms are not carried out when losers can block their implementation and compensations are feasible. In our model, a government tries to sequentially implement two efficient reforms by bargaining with interest groups. The organization of interest...

In this paper I suggest a unified explanation for two puzzles in the inventory literature: first, estimates of inventory speeds of adjustment in aggregate data are very small relative to the apparent rapid reaction of stocks to unanticipated variations in sales. Second, estimates of inventory...

When financial markets are incomplete, shareholders will in general disagree on the optimal level of investment to be undertaken by the firm (Grossman and Hart, 1979). Macroeconomic models with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets (e.g. Krusell and Smith, 1998) usually ignore this issue...

This paper documents and provides an explanation for the main stylized facts about net and gross workers flows across states in the U.S. While it is generally known that gross flows of population across locations are significantly larger in the United States than within most European countries...