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Journal Article
Corruption and innovation
In this article, the author illustrates how corruption can affect an industry's rate of innovation. An interesting result of analysis is that, under certain parameter ranges, small increases in the penalties to corruption or the effectiveness of detection can result in large increases in product innovation.
Working Paper
The role of housing in labor reallocation
This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to analyze the role of local housing markets and moving costs in determining the character and extent of labor reallocation in the US economy. Labor reallocation in the model is driven by idiosyncratic city-specific productivity shocks, which we measure using a dataset that we compile using more than 350 U.S. cities for the years 1984 to 2008. Based on this measurement, we find that our model is broadly consistent with the city-level evidence on net and gross population flows, employment, wages and residential ...
Journal Article
Seasonal monetary policy
Discussion Paper
Plant level irreversible investment and equilibrium business cycles
This paper studies a version of the neoclassical growth model where heterogeneous establishments are subject to partial irreversibilities in investment. Under such investment technology, the optimal decision rules of establishments are of the (S,s) variety. A novel contribution of the paper is the analysis of the general equilibrium dynamics arising from aggregate productivity shocks. This is a difficult task given the high dimensionality of the state vector, which includes the distribution of establishments across capital levels and idiosyncratic shocks. The paper overcomes this difficulty ...
Working Paper
What are the short-run effects of increasing labor market flexibility?
This paper evaluates the short-run effects of introducing labor market flexibility to an economy characterized by large firing taxes. Different reforms are considered: 1) eliminating all firing taxes, 2) introducing flexible new contracts while retaining the firing taxes on workers employed previous to the reform, and 3) introducing temporary contracts. The paper finds that eliminating all firing taxes increases the unemployment rate much more in the short run than in the long run, that introducing new flexible contracts has similar effects as eliminating all firing taxes, and that ...
Journal Article
The aggregate effects of advance notice requirements
This article analyzes the effects of advance notice requirements on aggregate output, wages, employment, and welfare levels. The author finds that, contrary to firing taxes, advance notice requirements do not lead to reduction in employment. However, they can reduce welfare levels considerably more than firing taxes.
Working Paper
Adverse Selection, Risk Sharing and Business Cycles
I consider a real business cycle model in which agents have private information about an idiosyncratic shock to their value of leisure. I consider the mechanism design problem for this economy and describe a computational method to solve it. This is an important contribution of the paper since the method could be used to solve a wide class of models with heterogeneous agents and aggregate uncertainty. Calibrating the model to U.S. data I find a striking result: That the information frictions that plague the economy have no effects on business cycle fluctuations.
Newsletter
Dollarization in Argentina
Working Paper
Search, self-insurance and job-security provisions
We construct a general equilibrium model to evaluate the quantitative effects of severance payments in the presence of contracting and reallocational frictions. Key elements of the model are: 1) establishment level dynamics, 2) imperfect insurance markets, and 3) variable search decisions. Contrary to previous studies that analyzed severance payments in frictionless environments, we find that severance payments reduce unemployment, produce negative insurance effects and improve levels.
Working Paper
Fixed term employment contracts in an equilibrium search model
Fixed term employment contracts have been introduced in number of European countries as a way to provide flexibility to economies with high employment protection levels. We introduce these contracts into the equilibrium search model in Alvarez and Veracierto (1999), a version of the Lucas and Prescott island model, adapted to have undirected search and variable labor force participation. We model a contract of length J as a tax on separations of workers with tenure higher than J. We show a version of the welfare theorems, and characterize the efficient allocations. This requires solving a ...