This paper addresses the puzzle of why redistributive legislation, which benefits a small minority, may pass with overwhelming majorities. It models a legislature in which the same agenda setter serves for two periods, showing how he can exploit a legislature (completely) in the first period by...

We construct a heterogeneous-firm model with a continuum of inputs to study the impact of offshoring on job flows at both the intensive and extensive margins. We identify three channels through which a reduction in the cost of offshoring affects firm-level employment: a job-relocation effect, a...

Empirical work in macroeconomics almost universally relies on the hypothesis of rational expectations. This paper departs from the literature by considering a variety of alternative expectations formation models. We study the econometric properties of a popular New Keynesian monetary DSGE model...

This paper exploits information from the term structure of survey expectations to identify news shocks in a a DSGE model with rational expectations. We estimate a structural business-cycle model with price and wage stickiness. We allow for both unanticipated and anticipated components ("news")...

This paper tests the ability of popular New Keynesian models, which are traditionally used to study monetary policy and business cycles, to match the data regarding a key channel for monetary transmission: the dynamic interactions between macroeconomic variables and their corresponding...

This paper presents a mechanism inducing costly research and innovation in the absence of intellectual property rights. The mechanism relies on forward contracting between the provider of the innovation and firms or individuals that benefit from the pecuniary effects of the innovation, rather...

Why do legal disputes ever go to trial? Prior research emphasizes the role of mistakes, irrationalities, or asymmetric information because rational litigants with complete or symmetric information should choose pre-trial settlements over the costs and risks of trial. Using a dynamic...

Consider a monopolist which sells a durable good and also consumables that require use of the durable good. After the firm sells the durable good, it has an incentive to charge a price greater than marginal cost for the consumables. Realizing that they will have to pay a high price for...

This paper studies the implications of globalization for the dynamics of macroeconomic variables over the business cycle for a small open trade-dependent economy, such as South Korea. We study the impact of globalization through the lens of a structural model. Globalization is modeled as a...

We examine the optimal disruption of dark (covert and illegal) networks. Of central importance is that an interventionist will generally have incomplete information about the dark network's architecture. We derive the optimal disruption strategy in a stylized model of dark network intervention...