Shimer (2005) showed that a standard search and matching model of the labor market fails to generate fluctuations of unemployment and vacancies of the magnitude observed in US data in response to shocks to average labor productivity of plausible magnitude. He also suggested that wage...

There is pervasive evidence that individuals invest primarily in domestic assets and thus hold poorly diversified portfolios. Empirical studies suggest that informational asymmetries may play a role in explaining the bias towards domestic assets. In contrast, theoretical studies based on...

This paper explores the implications of culturally biased testing for the employment decisions of firms. Only the workers know whether they can do the job or not so firms test them. Wages are made contingent on the test results which are public information. The threshold result for hiring...

This paper introduces risk averse workers into a search and matching model and considers the quantitative performance of the model over the business cycle. Wages are determined by long term contracts between workers and firms, with firms providing insurance to workers against variation in labor...

This paper develops and structurally estimates a learning model in which firms acquire information about workers' ability by observing their performance over time. A firm consists of a collection of jobs which differ in the informational content of performance, as measured by the dispersion in...