Working Papers

EEO-1 employment data document the vast over-representation of Asian Americans and vast under-representation of African Americans at tech companies in recent years. How did this happen?

Even if psychological factors influence participants’ decision-making, as behavioral economists compellingly argue, incorporating such factors into economic theory would seem to require that market participants adhere to elementary logical rules.

Over the last four decades, Americans have consistently told pollsters that they favor higher taxes on business and the wealthy, even as tax policy has moved sharply in the other direction.

The Theory of the Firm, Financial Flows, and Economic Performance

It is commonly overlooked that the concept of market efficiency embowers a time-dimension. Illustrating with an example from the class of persistent random walks, we show that a price process can be a martingale on one time-scale but inefficient on another.

This paper analyzes the link between Kamakura Risk Information Services (KRIS) data on megabank default probabilities and credit spreads.

Economists’ infamous failure at predicting the recent financial crisis has brought new impetus to studies on diversity in the economics profession. Such studies have underlined how diversity plays a prominent role in enriching economic analyses.

Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies. That is not to say that they don’t exist. They are created when employers or government agencies tamper with the natural functioning of the wage mechanism.

We provide an explanation for the large spatial wage disparities and low male migration in India based on the trade-off between consumption-smoothing, provided by caste-based rural insurance networks, and the income-gains from migration.

The effect of ethnic violence on electoral results provides useful insights into voter behaviour and the incentives for political parties in democratic societies.

We consider nonparametric identification and estimation of pricing kernels, or equivalently of marginal utility functions up to scale, in consumption based asset pricing Euler equations. Ours is the first paper to prove nonparametric identification of Euler equations under low level conditions (without imposing functional restrictions or just assuming completeness).

This paper, an extension of the Presidential Address to the International Economic Association, evaluates alternative strands of macro-economics in terms of the three basic questions posed by deep downturns: What is the source of large perturbations? How can we explain the magnitude of volatility? How do we explain persistence?

Exploiting three earthquakes in Italy as quasi-experiments, we analyse the response of homeowners’ consumption to transfers targeted to finance housing repair and reconstruction. To the extent that funds are made available up-front, these transfers are akin to loans, mainly affecting the liquidity of households’ wealth

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness.

There is a renewed interest in the size of labour supply elasticities and the discrepancy between micro and macro estimates. Recent contributions have stressed the distinction between changes in labour supply at the extensive and the intensive margin. In this paper, we stress the importance of individual heterogeneity and aggregation problems.