Much of macroeconomics is concerned with the allocation of physical capital, human capital, and labor over time and across people. The decisions on savings, education, and labor supply that generate these variables are made within families. Yet the family (and decision-making in families) is...

Information asymmetries can prevent markets from operating efficiently. An important example is the labor market, where employers face uncertainty about the productivity of job candidates. We examine theoretically and with laboratory experiments three key questions related to hiring via...

This article examines the causal relations between non-European immigration and the characteristics of the housing market in host regions. We constructed a unique database from administrative records and used it to assess annual migration flows into France's 22 administrative regions from 1990...

This paper studies the effect of the firm-size distribution on the relationship between employment and output. We construct a theoretical model, which predicts that changes in demand for industry output have larger effects on employment in industries characterised by a distribution that is more...

In this survey, we review the quantitative macroeconomic literature analyzing consumer debt and default. We start by providing an overview of consumer bankruptcy law in the US and document the relevant institutional changes over time. We proceed with a comprehensive empirical section, describing...

This study investigates the characteristics that contribute to elderly poverty, mainly focusing on individuals' lifetime work experience. It adopts the heterogeneous relative poverty line which differs by gender, province of residence and over time. It calculates the work experience and obtains...

Education policies depend in part on the presence of externalities, but very little evidence exists to confirm the existence of such externalities. In this paper we investigate if there are spillover effects from education within peer groups at the workplace. We estimate the effect of increasing...

This paper attempts to add to the understanding of the causes for the differing recent developments in inequality in OECD countries. The similarity of shocks and technological changes affecting these countries suggests that interactions of these shocks and countryspecific institutions are...

Why do some people become entrepreneurs (and others don't)? Why are firms so heterogeneous, and many firms so small? To start, the paper briefly documents evidence from the empirical literature that the relationship between entrepreneurship and education is U-shaped, that many entrepreneurs...

This paper provides a cross-country comparison of life-cycle and business-cycle fluctuations in the dispersion of household-level wage innovations. We draw our inference from household panel data sets for the US, the UK, and Germany. First, we find that household characteristics explain about...